


And Go Home

by bomberqueen17



Series: Home Out In The Wind [4]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multi, Out of Body Experiences, Threesome, character reconciliations, hot old people sex, lol in body experiences too, memory retrieval, some of this is fluffy if you consider smut to be fluffy, this isn't as fluffy as I meant it to be, tying up loose ends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2017-07-27
Packaged: 2018-09-11 18:58:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,360
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9002758
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: The epilogue, following on from Never Wrote A Letter.I know I promised threesomes and sunshine but it turns out that wrapping up all these loose ends does involve some plot after all.





	1. Pay The Debt I Owe

**Author's Note:**

> if this epic gets long enough I'll have used every word in that dang song.  
>  _When I pay the debt I owe_  
>  to that commissary store  
> Gonna pawn my watch and chain  
> and go home.

Poe woke up and didn’t know where he was, but he knew he was surprised to wake up. It took him a moment of staring at a clean white ceiling illuminated by what was plainly sunlight before he finally gave up on remembering. Brain damage, he thought, and pushed himself carefully up on one elbow, grimacing at the doozy of a headache pounding behind his eyes. He might be hung-over.

The world tipped and spun a little, and he braced himself against it, sick as the memory of the rhyndo came back. But after a moment, it steadied out, and he blinked in some surprise around at a pleasant little bedroom he was quite sure he’d never seen before.

And there, in the corner of it, was BB-8, plugged in to a charging port, one light next to the charge cable blinking softly to indicate the charge was complete.

Memory returned then, a little fuzzy around the edges, but Poe remembered it all, all right, and slipped out of the bed— he was in clothing he’d never seen before, a set of the kind of ill-fitting anonymous pajamas you got at the nicer sort of hotel on Inner Rim planets, what the fuck— and over to the astro droid, pressing the button to end the charge cycle and power up.

BB-8 spun up instantly and beep-whirred at him in recognition and a little confusion.

“Oh,” B said, “Poe, good morning, is it morning?”

“It is morning,” Poe said, “I think, I don’t know where we are.”

“Util,” B said, “Northern hemisphere, capital city, post-coup.”

“Thank you,” Poe said, and couldn’t resist sliding his arms around the droid and hugging em. “You stayed with me,” he said quietly, resting his head against the smooth side of BB’s upper dome, away from the sensors. The surface of the metal was cool but warmed quickly to the touch, familiar and unlike anything else.

“You get into too much trouble without me,” BB answered, modulating eir volume for Poe’s proximity. “You were not well last night, you lost consciousness while debriefing with General Organa. She was not very alarmed and said she’d expected as much, but I was worried!”

“I’m sorry to have worried you,” Poe said. “I really passed out in front of the general, huh?”

“She said you’d done it before,” Beep conceded.

“I had,” Poe said. “It’s. Not my finest moment. I assume she was good-humored about it, at least.”

“Yes,” BB-8 said, a little cranky. “You need to observe adequate rest protocols! You have sustained brain damage recently! More so than usual!”

“This is true,” Poe said, and kissed BB-8 next to the sensor array again. He remembered, now, the various events of yesterday. The thing that clung closest to his memory, though, was Finn, a soft solid presence in the Force, holding him close, keeping him from harm, and murmuring warm promises to him.

He loved Finn, there was no point trying to deny that; he loved him, he wanted to be with him, all the time, he needed him. And part of him wanted to twist up miserably, in cynical expectation of that being used against him the way it always was. But that memory was so compelling, Finn’s sturdy sweetness and implacable faith. He couldn’t bring himself to pine.

Finn demanded trust, and everything that Poe was wanted to give it to him.

“I’m adequately rested for now,” Poe said to BB. “Do you know if I have any clothes anywhere?”

“The ship you and Rey stole,” BB-8 said, “Rey told Pava where to find it, and Pava and Wexley went and got it and brought it back here. They said there was a bunch of stuff of yours in it.”

Poe sat back and blinked at BB-8, confused by a number of things-- firstly, that ey was using people’s last names now, and secondly, by the entire story. “Rey and I stole a ship?” He had no memory of that, at all, not even a weird phantom sense-impression.

“I wasn’t there,” BB-8 said, a little resentfully. “You made me leave, remember?”

Poe stared at em for a moment, blank. He remembered that much. But it was at the edge of— it should have been something dramatic, like an abyss or gaping maw, those were the phrases they used to describe things in holodramas. It wasn’t. It was just a kind of fuzzy blankness, neutral-colored, that he couldn’t really look straight at. “I remember that I made you leave,” he said. “But I don’t— know what— happened after that?”

“Well,” BB-8 said, “you stole a ship, probably because you found out that bounty hunters were after you, with Rey, and Wexley can’t believe the thing actually flew here because it’s a piece of actual junk, makes the Millennium Falcon look like a high-end racing yacht, and I’m quoting him on that one.”

“I gotta see this,” Poe said, and it was enough that he went out barefoot in pajamas, because there was no trace of clothing in the little bedroom he’d woken up in.

 

 

Poe whistled, long and low. “That really _is_ a piece of shit,” he said, looking at the beat-up little light-duty short-range cargo hauler sitting in the berth, crookedly parked, with some extremely suspect-looking solar charging arrays unrolled across the duracrete. They looked like they’d been cobbled together out of actual garbage.

“I told you,” BB-8 said.

They went in together, and Poe waited for it to look familiar. It really didn’t. It was cramped and vaguely grimy, though it had been painstakingly cleaned at some recent date, and bore a lot of marks of careful repairs.

There was a single berth, and it was covered in pillows, the bedding rumpled like it had been left in a hurry without being made.

There was a little galley. Poe found the conservator, and opened it to find nothing but a single, mostly-empty container of frijol and roz. He sniffed at it. It was— he’d made this, surely he had, it was his go-to thing to make when he only had simple cooking facilities. He blinked at it, shut the container, stuck it back in the conservator, poked through the other compartments. Almost all of these supplies were the kind of thing he would stock up on, were he left in sole charge of provisioning for a journey, but he didn’t remember buying any of them. This was how he’d organize them, too, if it were left to him to put them away.

There were even the breakfast rations he liked, the kind you could just auto-heat in their little tin. He was hungry, so he ate one, because there didn’t seem to be any reason not to. It didn’t bring back any particular memories.

He poked through more of the storage compartments, and was confronted with his own toiletries kit, with his own shaving stuff, his own hair products, his own trimmers, sitting on a pile of his clothes, folded the way he folded them.

“This is so weird, B,” he said, but lost no time, picking out a fresh set of clothes from the ones here, because he was not going to wear these anonymous weird hotel pajamas any longer. Bonus: his boots were here, his favorite ones. He’d been wearing his ugly shower sandals yesterday, for the Force alone knew what possible reason, and he’d assumed that meant these beloved boots were lost. But no, here they were, reasonably well-maintained, with a clean pair of socks balled-up inside one of them, as if he’d set them out to put them on and then changed his mind.

“Huh,” he said, and went into the tiny ‘fresher, found his own towel in there, cleanish to boot, and noted that the thing was set up to use real water. He poked at the indicator. It was well-provisioned. “Well, shit, B,” he said, and took advantage.

He didn’t spend much time, just got all the assorted blood and dirt and filth off himself— especially his filthy feet, he’d walked out here barefoot like an idiot because he just hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone— and the soap, the soap smelled familiar. He stood for a long moment breathing the scent in. It was familiar. Not from anything. It had to be just— he’d used this ‘fresher before, with this soap. He’d stood right here, he’d—

He couldn’t focus on it, couldn’t really remember it, and after a moment, he switched the water off and got out, toweling himself off as best he could in the tiny space. He had to step out into the ship to get dressed.

It felt really good to be back in his own clothes, but also disconcerting, because he’d lost enough weight that nothing quite fit him right. Even his damn underwear sagged a little.

BB-8 had been playing with the ship’s interfaces, and brought up a note onto the heads-up display. Poe squinted at it.

_Went into town, you were out, I didn’t want to wake you_

_going back to that pub, i think that woman is a friendly_

_i feel a lot better today and i’m okay, i hope you didn’t over-tire yourself_

_i won’t stay in town long, i should be back before midday_

_if i’m not back by nightfall, take the ship to the main city on this planet and look in the folder on my datapad marked Tooka Holos, there are instructions. Don’t rush off to rescue me, there are reinforcements in the main city and they’ll help you._

_But don’t worry. I’ll be back._

He shook his head. “I didn’t write that,” he said. “I don’t know who this is from or to.”

“Analysis suggests your writing style,” BB-8 said, “matching your vocabulary and word patterns and also the fact that your datapad has a folder called Tooka Holos that contains a number of holos of tookas being tookas but also some lightly-encrypted mission briefs that you should probably have under better security.”

Poe reread the note. “I don’t,” he said, shaking his head slightly.

“You did,” BB-8 said. “Furthermore, analysis suggests this totally reads like the kind of note you leave for people you’ve slept with.”

“You don’t know that,” Poe scoffed, unnerved.

“You’re being a big coward,” BB-8 said. “Go inside and talk to Rey.”

“You don’t really think I slept with her,” Poe said. He’d remember that. He’d definitely— she was terrifying, he’d never—

“I don’t know,” BB-8 said primly, “you sent me away, so I wouldn’t know.”

“Stop it,” Poe said, but he got his boots on and deleted the message off the heads-up display before going back inside.

 

 

“She’s still unconscious,” Kalonia said, “and so is Finn, to forestall your next question. Both of them are expected to recover fully, don’t worry.”

Poe twisted his hands together for a moment. “Can I— sit with Finn, for a bit?”

“If you don’t wake him,” Kalonia said. “He’s lightly wounded enough that we can accelerate the healing just with bacta patches, but it’s a big strain on the body to do it that way and he must not be disturbed.”

Poe was familiar with the process (similar to, but lighter than, what they’d done for Finn before-- much lighter, if there was no sedation), so he promised to be quiet, and eased himself into the dim room where Finn was in bed.

Finn looked perfectly healthy, tinged blue by the light from the monitor, childlike in deep sleep. Poe sat for a few minutes, gazing at the roundness of cheek and lip, the perfect line of his heavy jaw, the sharp-soft edge of his neatly-trimmed hairline.

He wanted to kiss Finn’s face, his cheek or forehead, wanted to stroke his soft hair, wanted to touch him, but he’d promised he wouldn’t risk a disturbance. So, after sitting for long enough listening to Finn breathe that his mind unwound a little, Poe stood up and slipped silently out of the room, and stood in the hallway collecting himself, letting the memory of Finn’s regular breathing try to settle in place and overwrite the pain and fear of yesterday.

“There you are,” Kes said softly, coming down the hall. “I was looking for you.”

“Hey, Dad,” Poe said, and turned and walked with him the direction he’d been heading. Kes slid his arm around Poe’s shoulders and pulled him in as they walked, and Poe leaned into him.

Kes kissed the side of his head and kept walking. “Finn’s still asleep, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Poe said, “Kalonia said he needed a few more hours.”

BB-8 had plugged emself into the data port of the medical center’s main data system. Poe patted eir upper dome near the sensor array as he passed by, and BB-8 chirped something semi-unintelligible, and Poe figured he’d leave em to it.

“Come sit with me, then,” Kes said. “I wanna talk.”

Poe rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. He’d nerved himself all up to deal with Rey, and now he didn’t have anything do with all those nerves. Maybe yelling at his Papa would make him feel better.

Kes led him unerringly to a sitting room that was currently unused, and it struck Poe that his father surely had scouted out the entire building. Not just because he’d been a Pathfinder and had kept their much-vaunted tendency of superior environmental awareness at all times, but also because he was the sort of person innately who liked to know where things were.

Poe had never really before given much thought to how much of his father’s personality was innate and how much was due to the life he’d led, which had been pretty complicated. Poe knew firsthand now what glory in battle really meant, and also that it was surely that much more gory and immediate for a footsoldier than a pilot. But Poe had done enough on-the-ground work to intimately know the difference.

And he had a lot more in common with Kes, now. He thought he’d probably rather chew glass than bring up the interrogation droids, though. The feeling was probably shared, or surely he’d’ve known before last month or whatever that his father had literally written the textbook on resisting those things.

It was a nice little room, sunlit and well-furnished, with a tasteful holodeck display in one corner, and soft couches and chairs placed in nice conversational groupings next to little side tables. Poe sprawled comfortably on one of the couches, and Kes settled into a nearby chair.

“Looks like you managed to clean up and find some real clothes,” Kes said.

“You too,” Poe pointed out. Kes had even shaved; he looked downright presentable. Poe was uncomfortably aware that his beard was on the verge of gaining sentience. But he hadn’t wanted to take the time and hot water to shave it in that little ship.

Kes shrugged. “I eventually peeled myself off the floor and found a nice couch to sleep on. I saw they gave you a real bed. You’re a genuine war hero.”

“Ha,” Poe said. “I don’t remember. Who put me into those pajamas?”

“I helped,” Kes said. “I haven’t seen you passed-out like that since trying to wake you up to do chores when you were about fifteen.”

“I’d had a rough day,” Poe said with a shrug. Kes snorted, and the conversation went quiet for a moment. Poe watched the dust motes in the sunlight and thought about how to even begin to ask his father the questions he needed to.

“You know,” Kes said, after a long moment, and there was something a little bit awkward about the diffidence in his posture, a little studied perhaps, as if there were a great deal riding on this, “you could, ah.”

“Spit it out, Papa,” Poe said, not unkindly.

Kes tilted his head and gave Poe an unimpressed look. And it was in that moment, really, for the first time, that Poe suddenly realized that his father and he were really both adults, really on a mostly-equal footing, and there truly no longer was any particular vestige of the authority his father had always sort of casually had over him-- either for Poe to obey or defy. It was immaterial. They were just two men, with a shared history, but no particular obligation to one another, in either direction.

It was utterly bizarre, and felt like being unmoored, and Poe sat up to put both of his feet on the floor.

“What is it, Papa?” he asked, because while it was freeing, it was also terrifying. They owed one another nothing, and that meant that they had nothing tying them together except sentiment.

Kes gave him a narrow-eyed look, not unkind but certainly analytical, and Poe had no idea what he was thinking. “It seems to me,” Kes said, a little gruff and breaking eye contact like he was making himself vulnerable by this admission, “that it’s silly to expect you to do all your reconciling and recuperating in a strange place like this.”

He meant Util. “Well,” Poe said. “We were going to be sent back to the base, the General said.”

Kes nodded, looking down at his hands. “I thought maybe you’d want to come back to Yavin IV with me for a little bit. All of you.”

“Oh,” Poe said, and it made sense, and it also made sense that Kes would be nervous to ask it. And all the homesickness Poe had felt since he’d first left that place, twenty years ago now almost, came crashing back, and Poe had to take a breath in and let it out before he could say, “I’d love that.”

Kes looked up, then, shy and pleased and a little disbelieving, and Poe felt warmth expand through his chest cavity at having made his father make that face. No, they weren’t untethered, and they still were obligated to one another, but it was-- it wasn’t the chain Poe had mistakenly been thinking it was, the heavy weight of guilt. It was something he could choose, something they both could choose. “You think the others would like it?” he asked, and Poe braced himself a little bit, inwardly, for Kes to parrot back some of Poe’s own adolescent mean comments about the birdshit-filled jungle backwater. But Kes didn’t.

“I think they’d love it,” Poe said, sincerely, when nothing of the sort was forthcoming.

Kes smiled. “I already asked Leia,” he said. “She said she wanted to come too.”

“Surely she doesn’t have time,” Poe said, laughing.

Kes’s smile went a little rueful. “Handing the harbor over to the Fronteras has already made it a First Order target,” he said. “So there’s no real further harm in just-- handing it over to the Resistance. If anything it’ll mitigate the risk, having them there to protect themselves.”

“Really,” Poe breathed. It was a long time since he’d considered the politics of the Yavin Harbor Council, but he didn’t have to think about it too hard to know how long they all must have argued about this before Kes even came here.

Kes shrugged. “Anyway,” he said. “Organa’s coming, whether the rest of you do too or not.”

“Wow,” Poe said. He considered that. “Well, we’ll need a base, won’t we?” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You gave my room away anyway.”

“I did not,” Kes said, and he sounded actually offended. Poe looked at him, and he was actually offended. “Who would I have given your room to?”

“You have, like, fifty adopted kids now,” Poe said, and he felt like a mean little jerk for even bringing it up, but it was true.

Kes’s offendedness went cold, which was never a good sign, and he ran his hand down the front of his shirt, collecting himself in a fashion that suggested Poe was about to lose this argument, which he hadn’t really intended to be an argument at all.

“There’s a dormitory,” Kes said, eyes a little averted. He was being nice about this, then. “A couple times I’ve had a kid or two stay in the house, the real hard cases. But they stayed in the guest room, Poe. I never gave your bedroom away.”

“Oh,” Poe said, and felt like an asshole. He’d pretty much left for good like fifteen years ago. “Why the hell not?”

“In case you visited,” Kes said, a little frostier, and that wasn’t his hard cold argument-winning frost, that was his made-himself-too-vulnerable retrenchment frost. It had a distinctive brittle quality to it that wasn’t at all like Kes’s usual implacable steel. “I wasn’t going to have you go stay in Norasol’s house just because I’d given your room to some spice-addicted moppet I felt sorry for while he was detoxing, or some tragic traumatized orphan who’d fixated on me and just needed to be close for a while. Your bedroom has always only ever been _your_ bedroom.”

“Oh,” Poe said again, and it came out small. He felt like a piece of shit. But he hadn’t known.

Kes stood up, and Poe glanced up in some trepidation as he realized the man was approaching him. To his astonishment, Kes knelt in front of Poe’s feet. “Baby boy,” he said softly, “it didn’t do you any good because I never told you that.”

Poe opened his mouth to argue, but couldn’t think of anything, and Kes took both of his hands and held them. “You don’t get to feel shitty about my fuckup. That immaculate, untouched bedroom is nothing but a monument to my stubbornness. But, if you come back, between mine and Norasol’s there’s enough bedrooms for any configuration of bed-sharing or not you want with all your little friends, and anybody else you want close.”

“Papa,” Poe said, scandalized.

“I’m telling you,” Kes said, and the grin was back, “you’ve slept with that girl, I know the look.”

“I’m sure I haven’t,” Poe said, but his huffiness was a little derailed by a weird little sense memory of her hands in his hair. That had to be another vision, and surely could not have really happened.

Kes shook his head slowly, chewing on his lower lip. “I know I’m right,” he said.

 

______

 

 

Bolt had spent basically the entire evening and night waiting for someone to notice he wasn’t really with the Resistance, on-edge in anticipation of the moment they noticed him and stuck him in the brig or something, or doled out the punishment Pava had promised him, at least. He’d shed Arana’s coveralls, depositing them carefully in the room that had become the makeshift personal supplies room, and so he was going around in nondescript civilian clothes. But he wasn’t hiding. He didn’t want to hide. He wanted to be told what to do.

He just. Wasn’t exactly eager to remind anyone that he needed to be told what to do, either.

He helped out, here and there, whenever he saw something that needed more hands to make lighter work. He unloaded some big freightlifters full of supplies, and was rewarded, at the end, with a piece of fruit he’d never seen before. The others all got one too, and he watched them to see how to eat it.  
It was juicy and tart and he’d never had anything like it in his life. He was starving, but he was sure that wasn’t the only reason it tasted so good. One of the other unloaders showed him the trick for getting the peel off the segments after you’d broken it up. It was possibly the best thing he’d ever eaten.

He eventually found his way into a room that was being used as a dormitory, and was nonchalantly handed a blanket and told to find a corner. So he did.

He’d been either on stimulants or coming off them for so long that he’d forgotten how natural sleep worked. He lay in the room full of gentle snores and hushed whispers for a long time, staring at the shadows moving on the ceiling as the cargo loaders worked outside all night, listening to the whoosh and rumble of starcraft coming and going and the occasional bangs and thumps of things getting dropped. There was never any hullabaloo, though, and it all seemed to keep going smoothly.

The noise was kind of soothing; he didn’t mind lying awake in it, surrounded by the hum of peaceful, expected activity.

He must have slept; he blinked his eyes open and it was full daylight, the light streaming in around ineffectual window coverings. The room was still full of sleeping people, but there were rustles of activity; it seemed like maybe one shift was getting up and another was coming to bed.

Bolt folded his blanket neatly and left it in a pile next to the door, and followed along until he found the makeshift cafeteria, where a striking blue xeno with four arms and a dazzling array of facial protuberances served him something in a bowl.

He must have stared at her too long, because she curled what might have been a lip and said, “What, you never seen a rabwa before?”

“Is that what-- is that you?” Bolt fumbled. He had to save this interaction, she was the person with the food.

“Yes,” she said, impatient.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sincerely, “you’re just-- you’re so _beautiful_. I’ve never-- I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to stare!”

She made a noise that might have been a laugh. “You get an extra scoop for sweet talkin’, kid,” and she plopped another spoonful of whatever it was into his bowl. “Now quit holdin’ up the line.”

“Yes, ma’am, thank you,” he said, and moved along.

“They teach ‘em manners nowadays, I guess,” the xeno said to her humanoid coworker, and he shuffled to a table and ate in the corner while nobody paid him any particular mind. He was starving, almost shaking with it-- whatever had happened to him yesterday, his body was alive now and wanted to be fed. He was glad of the extra spoonful. He could have eaten more, but it seemed like pushing his luck to try to get another portion.

He had to find someone who was in charge, he decided. No-- Finn. He had to specifically find Finn. If Pava found him, she was going to kick his ass. But Finn knew he’d fought on their side, and would advocate for him. Well, was more likely to advocate for him than anyone else here was, at least.

So he had to find Finn.

They’d taken Finn to the med bay, he’d heard someone say as much, so Bolt very hesitantly made his way there, watching traffic patterns and trying to blend in so no one would look at him. He made it into a smallish room with a man in it surrounded by data holos, monitoring all of them and looking harried.

“Do you need the doctor?” the man asked Bolt, without preamble.

“Uh,” Bolt said, thinking of how he’d almost died. “N-- I don’t-- uh.” Shit. That wasn’t a good answer. He should have planned for this.

The man frowned at him, then picked up something blaster-shaped and pointed it at him. Bolt flinched violently, not recognizing what it was at first. “Hey now,” the man said. “Calm down, I just gotta scan you.”

Bolt had really thought the man was going to summarily shoot him in the face, so the breezy reassurance wasn’t very reassuring. He tried to compose himself, and really tried not to get mad at the guy. The man was frowning intently at the readout.

“Stars,” he said, “you’ve had some terrible things happen to you. You’d better have the doc take a peek.”

“I’m fine,” Bolt said, really nettled. He’d spent his entire life having his reflexes finely honed into weapons unto themselves, which tended not to pair well with being startled. No one here knew that. It was common knowledge in the First Order that you didn’t make sudden moves around the TIE pilots, but it was clearly not the same with Resistance snubfighter pilots, and nobody here took any care.  “I just came to see Eff-- Finn.” He remembered, just in time, not to use the man’s aurenumeric designation. But, not quite in time, really; the man squinted at him, then back down at the readout.

“Finn’s still under sedation. Who are you?” the man asked.

Bolt really considered just turning around and running away. But he’d come here for a reason, and the man hadn’t _actually_ shot him in the face, and he had to turn himself in sometime, even though his heart rate still hadn’t settled down from his violent fright a moment before.

“JN-4002,” he said, shoving his shaking hands behind his back.

The man blinked at him, frowned, then keyed something in, and Bolt saw his own medical file come up, with an identity holopic he didn’t remember them taking. He looked awful in it, wide-eyed and drawn, not quite looking at the holocam, like maybe he hadn’t known they were taking it.

“Ohhhh,” the man said. He frowned, and looked up sharply. “You shouldn’t be out of bed. You’re not supposed to be here at all!”

“I,” Bolt said, twisting his hands together behind his back as the shaking spread to his shoulders. “There were— ext— extenuating circums— stances.” He’d just figured when this happened to him it was the drugs, but his body seemed to be doing it on its own just fine. Great. His mouth was dry and his instincts were screaming at him to get out of here, but he knew if he ran they’d chase him and it would be worse.

“I bet,” the man said. A message popped up in the corner of one of his datascreens, and he said, “Okay, kid, go down that hall and go in the door on the left, the doc really wants to take a look at you.”

Pava had said there would be punishment for him. He’d assumed, from her tone, that it would be informal, but he didn’t know where she was in the chain of command. Maybe the doctor would administer it. Bolt swallowed hard, squared his shoulders, set his jaw, and nodded his thanks to the man before forcing himself to walk down the hallway.

“Bolt,” Dr. Kalonia said, as he came in the door. “Oh, my goodness, I’m so glad you’re all right. When I found out you’d snuck out I really thought zero-grav would kill you.” She got to her feet and came towards him but it was so carefully non-aggressive that he managed to stand his ground and not flinch as the door hissed shut behind him and she closed in.

“Almost did,” Bolt admitted. “You— weren’t wrong.”

She stared at him in dismay, then raised a hand gently, carefully inserting it between his arm and body and guiding him across the room. She radiated non-threatening, and it was just enough to keep Bolt from panicking. “Please,” she said, “come, sit, let me look at you. What happened? Can you tell me?”

He managed a deep breath, and sat obediently, tucking his shaking hands under his legs. “I don’t know if I c-can explain,” he said, but did his best. He hadn’t really expected the doctor would be the one to debrief him, but if she was the first to get ahold of him, it made sense.

He’d told her about the way he’d deceived the others on the cruiser and managed to steal Arana’s ship, trying to make it clear that the others hadn’t done anything wrong. She had a strange expression on her face, which he couldn’t parse; he was used to trying to read officers’ expressions but it wasn’t doing him any good. He got as far as blacking out in the X-Wing, and she interrupted him.

“I’m more interested in knowing your symptoms than the strategic situation,” she said. “I’m sure the— whoever’s in charge of the snubfighters, I don’t know if that’s Commander Dameron again, he hasn’t cleared his medical eval with me— they’ll need to hear all those details, but I just need to try to understand your condition. You said zero-grav had a bad effect on you, do you know how long you were unconscious?”

Bolt shook his head, confused. “No,” he said, “but— well—” He bit his lip. “I am pretty sure I was d-dying, I had fluid in my lungs and stuff, I couldn’t breathe, but then K-Kylo Ren,” it was hard to say the name, “he— _did_ something to me, I don’t know what. At the same time, about, as he did something to— to Poe.” He corrected himself. “C-c-commander Dameron.” You needed to be careful about officers’ designations.

“Ah,” the doctor said. “Yes, all right. That makes sense. Otherwise I couldn’t understand how you possibly could be alive and ambulatory.”

Bolt gradually calmed down a little bit as she examined him, then, because she moved slowly and told him what she was doing and when she used a scanner on him, she held it in a non-threatening way. She looked at the readout, and put the scanner down and came and gently picked up his hand, which was still shaking.

“Do you have a lot of these kinds of tremors?” she asked, as if it would be all right for him to answer in either the affirmative or negative.

“N-n-not as m-much now,” he said, struggling to get words out, “without d-drugs, just— just when I’m n-nervous.”

She had his hand between both of hers. Her hand was warm, and she rubbed her thumb soothingly across his knuckles. “You’re nervous now? Why is that?”

His mouth sealed itself shut, and he shook his head slightly, keeping his gaze down. She just kept rubbing his knuckles, waiting patiently.

“You can tell me,” she said quietly. “What you say to me is confidential, if you want. I don’t have to record it. Has someone threatened you?”

He frowned in incredulity, and shook his head. Who would even have to threaten him? “N-no,” he managed to say. “I, I just. I don’t. I don’t know what— I d-don’t know what you— what the Resistance— what the p-punishment is for— absence without leave— defying ord- orders— impers— impersonating an off- officer—” He breathed out, breathed in, trying to keep his voice from shaking.

“Oh, sweetie,” she said, which was nonsensical.

“So I was h-hoping to s-s-see Finn because at l-least he’d kn-kn-know that I— I— I,” Bolt said, and then had to grit his teeth to try to maintain control of himself. He was panicking, he recognized the signs now. It used to happen a lot more when he was on the stimulants. He also hadn’t cared as much, but then, he’d always been in-context, surrounded by other pilots who knew what was up. Here, he was the only one, and he was coming to understand that he was kind of a freak. X-Wing pilots weren’t like this, and this wasn’t the drugs, this was all him. He’d had another half a sentence to say, but he gave it up as a bad job and just pressed his teeth together instead and stared at his ever-more-distant feet, trying to force regular breaths in and out like the older pilots had taught him when he was a cadet.

“It’s all right,” Dr. Kalonia said, sort of far away, and she was still holding his hand. “I’m right here with you, Bolt, it’s all right. I think there were some mitigating circumstances. Oh, you’re doing so well. Good, deep breaths. You’re doing the right thing. Just like that, Bolt. Just like that.”

Everything went dark and far away for a little while, and he focused on the doctor’s voice and let her talk him down, and she was pretty good at it. They’d all known how to do this for each other, all the FO pilots, but she didn’t know the catchphrases, there were some phrases everybody knew and you could repeat them and it was familiar. She didn’t know them. Of course she didn’t know them. It was still okay. It still counted.

He mastered his breathing, eventually, and she was waiting calmly for him. “There you are,” she said. “You’re doing all right now.”

“I’m doing all right now,” he said. Maybe that was one of their catchphrases.

“That’s good,” she said. “Now. Bolt. Listen. I’m not in the command structure here, really, so I have nothing to do with anyone being punished or disciplined or any of that. If anyone is given any kind of punishment, even if it’s just being confined to quarters, I oversee that to make sure that the person being punished is not medically harmed by it. That’s my role. If anyone wants to punish you, I’ll be here to make sure you’re not taking any undue physical or mental harm from it.”

“Okay,” he said, mistrustful but too tired and flattened by fear to express it.

“I mean it,” she said. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. If you are afraid of anyone here, for any reason, you come to me, all right?”

He looked up at her, managing to school his features into obedient blankness. “Yes ma’am,” he said.

 

\-------

 

It was a lot of logistics, and Kes thought at one point with a sort of grim humor that back in the day when he was a twenty-two-year-old war hero, he’d’ve had no idea how to handle this, but now after thirty years of running a harbor, he was pretty confident about making this work. He let the high-ranking types hammer out the strategy, and worked with the mid-ranking types on coordinating the logistics, and sent out a couple of strategic long-range comms which, of course, Etto had been expecting. Kes had rolled his eyes at all the pre-planning, but he had long ago learned that just because you set out on a suicide mission didn’t mean you shouldn’t take help planning for the return trip just in case. It had saved him more than, well— at least a handful of times. (He should _not_ have survived his twenties.) Since they were traveling on the Fronteras network, Kes knew they’d get to everyone who needed them, whether he knew about it or not.

The Harbor Council was probably going to be annoyed with him, but not as much as they were probably going to be preoccupied in collecting on bets from one another. Kes didn’t condone it, but he knew about it. He was really just about the only holdout.

“Dameron,” Leia said, and he paused, blinking up from his datapad; he’d been making his way down a hallway, half-thinking of going to check up on Poe after the meeting that had just broken up.

“Ma’am,” he said, glancing past her to confirm there were other people in earshot. He cracked a smile. “You’ll have to be more specific, once Commander Dameron’s back from rest leave.”

“I know,” she said, favoring him with a brief smile. “But in the meantime, I can economize on words a bit.”

“It saved you _two syllables_ ,” he said.

“You’re so concerned by this,” she said, now visibly amused.

“It’s my position,” he said. “I can’t stand inefficiency, you know? And the worst are the false economies, when you think a shortcut will save you something, but it always winds up costlier, it just does.”

She laughed, at that. Kes mentally tallied who was still close enough to overhear them. Statura-- he was a few paces back and not engaged with them at all, but there was no way he wasn’t observing this. It would have to be for Leia to decide whether she wanted rumors to spread, but it would also be a good test, Kes supposed, of how loyal her people were to her, what wound up being said about her if she kept being chummy with him. “Well,” she said, “that was what I’d wanted to talk to you about.”

“False economies?” he said. “You know, if I had a Republic-backed credit for every time somebody tricked me into going off on a rant about false economies for their amusement— well, I’d still be broke, but I’ll be diplomatic and not say why.”

Statura snorted, clearly caught off-guard by it. Leia turned and glanced at him. “Sorry,” Statura said, “I wasn’t— that was just really funny.”

“If you like dad jokes,” Kes said, “I got a whole collection. Don’t think for a second that we get a lot of good stuff off the holonet way out in the Gordian Reach. No, sir, we gotta make our own entertainment.”

“At least Yavin can actually connect to the holonet once in a while,” Leia said. “We’ve had to run so dark that we couldn’t even have a reliable connection.”

“Mm,” Statura said, lighting up a little, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Pros and cons to being openly established somewhere,” Leia said, “but one of the pros is, you could probably catch up on whatever horrible holodrama you were addicted to.”

Statura shot Kes a sly look. “Bet the food’s good,” he said.

“Oh,” Kes said, “fair enough, it is.” He chewed on his lip a moment, considering that. His message should have arrived by now. He hoped someone had the wit to make sure Norasol saw it, before showing her the separate one he’d recorded for her.

“Do you still make--” Leia began, but bit it off. Kes glanced over at her, and her expression was conflicted, but he could make out wistfulness.

“I usually make my atol with masa but I know I could make you atol de roz,” Kes said quietly. “Norasol got the recipe when we lived on Alderaan, and I know how she makes it for visitors.”

Leia looked up at him, and smiled slowly. “It’s all right with masa,” she said. “I haven’t had it either way in— decades, probably.”

Statura looked between the two of them, and visibly tamped down curiosity, instead smiling in polite neutrality. _That’s a test_ , Kes thought, but to temper it a bit, said to him, “I was born on Alderaan.”

“Ah,” Statura said, interested. “Really!”

“So was Poe,” Kes said. “He doesn’t remember it, though.”

Leia suddenly turned her head, looking down the hallway intently. Kes was pretty attuned to physical movement in spaces, and he knew nobody had entered up ahead; she was reacting to something inaudible.

So Kes wasn’t really surprised when Luke stepped into the hallway. He had been in a small room that Kes’s prior scouting had revealed to be suitable for a bedroom; it made sense the man would have been resting, as he’d been up all night working with the Operations people.

Luke looked tired, and bleary, but there was no trace of sleep in his voice when he said, “Rey’s awake.”

 

 

________________

 

 

 

Norasol listened to the door opening, listened to whoever it was come in and wander around the house trying to find her. She should call out, help whoever it was find her. Either it was Etto, Kes’s assistant Rodia, the sweet little girl Nessa who came around all the time, or it was an enemy come at last to kill her, and if it was an enemy, then it was about damn time.

“If you’ve come to kill me, you’re almost too late,” she shouted, thinking on that. It would be such a pain in her ass if she finally got murdered now that she was too feeble to really do much damage in return. She’d really had her heart set on making them pay for it when they finally came for her, but she had so little power left, physically or spiritually. She’d just have to hope one of her hexes got them on the way back out of the house.

“What?” Etto asked, coming to the doorway.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. He was the least interesting of any of the possibilities. She was fond of him, but he didn’t even have the redeeming value of being pretty, like the other two people in this system with door codes to her house. (Rodia was ostentatiously beautiful, not really Norasol’s type-- she was tall, broad-shouldered, well-muscled, handsome and curvy and pretty like a peacock, with big sturdy capable hands and a razor wit. Nessa was lovely, petite and musical-voiced and soft, and if Norasol were thirty years younger and still in possession of her own heart, she’d be in love with Nessa. But it was a long time since Norasol had had anything left of her heart to give. And she was a very old woman, after all.)

“What did you say?” Etto asked, frowning deeply. “It really sounded like--”

“It doesn’t matter,” Norasol said. “Why have you come to bother me? I am an old woman and I don’t have time left for bullshit.”

Etto, unaccountably, laughed. “You never had any time for bullshit,” he said.

“Well,” she said. He had her, there. “True. What, then?”

Etto held up a datapad. “We got a databurst from the Resistance,” he said.

“Is Kes dead?” Norasol asked, steeling herself. She had numerous times in her life been called upon to face the unimaginable scenario of outliving that boy, who she’d guided from his mother’s womb with her own hands and cared for his whole life. This was only the most recent time of many, but for some reason it was harder than usual. (Her sweet little bird, with his wide wondering dark eyes, who had only ever wanted to be gentle, and had spent his whole life dealing in brutality.) Probably because she was so old now, and so thoroughly fed up with that boy’s shit. His and his son’s, who she’d also guided from his mother’s womb with her own hands and sent off to die. It was getting fucking tedious, was what it was.

“No,” Etto said, and he sounded happy, that asshole.

“Well did he save Poe or not? Is Poe dead?” Norasol demanded.

“No,” Etto said. “Poe’s alive. See for yourself, Kes sent a couple of messages.” The first thing he brought up was a text message, which Norasol had to squint to focus on.

“Kes didn’t write that,” she said.

“No,” Etto said, “of course not. It says, it’s from one of the comms people at the Resistance. It’s just the cover letter. One of these holos, Kes recorded and it’s for the Harbor Council to show everyone in the system.”

“Oh,” Norasol said, because she knew what that meant.

“It’s his announcement of our alliance with the Resistance,” Etto said. “I watched that one, and passed it along.” Kes had gone into this mission with the pre-approval of the Harbor Council to offer that alliance, so it wasn’t a surprise. “It’s pretty good,” Etto went on, as if that surprised him. “Kes really-- he said some good things.”

“Of course he did, I didn’t raise an idiot,” Norasol said. “No matter what I usually say.”

“There’s also a message to you, though,” Etto said. He selected it, and it came up on a freeze-frame, of Kes’s face, looking bored and fed-up. “With an attached file.” He opened the attached file, which was a holopic of Poe looking tired and thin and-- no, it wasn’t Poe, it was a young man with entirely the wrong ears, but almost exactly Poe’s face.

“ _Who is that_ ,” Norasol said.

“I don’t know,” Etto said. “Presumably Kes explains.”

“Fine,” Norasol said, impatient, and poked at the playback control.

“— is for Norasol Yauta,” Kes said. “So when you save it, just label it with that, they’ll know what to do.” He looked tired, shadows under his eyes, but his expression was animated; he was fired-up over something.

“Go ahead,” said a voice off-camera.

Kes looked straight into the holocam. “Norasol, I got a good one for you,” he said, and then he switched to Iberican and his speech picked up in rapidity. “I mean, also, I lived, and Poe’s all right, and apparently the rhyndo is a false alarm or something, I’ll have to let him explain it. But he’s fine. So there’s that. But I have a couple of things I need to tell you. Number one, I’m coming back to my house, so I hope you haven’t sold it yet, or if you did at least I hope you got a good price for it. Number two, Poe is coming, and he’s bringing a couple of friends, including one really beautiful boy I think he’s fucking, and a girl who’s either in love with him or crazy, I can’t tell, probably both.”

Norasol laughed at that. “It’d be about time he brought somebody home,” she said.

“Trust Poe to overachieve on that,” Etto said fondly.

“Beyond that,” Kes went on, “I’m bringing half the Resistance, which I’ll explain in the other message, that you probably already saw,” and he gestured, and Norasol said, “he puts too much faith in you,” and Etto said, “Shh,” because Kes had leaned in, and was saying, “and Leia Organa, so I guess you’re allowed to speak of her again in my presence.”

“Ha,” Norasol barked, throwing her head back, but she had to refocus quickly, because Kes was still talking.

“I don’t want to hear it,” Kes said, looking a little grim. “I still think she’s cursed, Norasol, I just don’t think there’s any escaping it.”

“Shows what you know,” Norasol said. Kes had the spiritual aptitude of a bar of soap, and she’d told him so many times. Well, maybe he was a little better-off than that, but he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about when it came to curses.

“You’ll be pleased, though,” Kes went on, looking a little smug, the little shit, “to find out that Leia has discovered the fate of the Missing, and you were wrong the whole time.”

“The Missing,” Etto said, leaning in sharply; he wasn’t Oaxctli himself, but he’d lost a cousin or something, he was one of the Fronteras guys who was really invested in the cause.

“Turns out the First Order had them this whole time,” Kes said, shrugging elaborately. “Who knew! I attached the ID holo of one of the First Order TIE pilots who defected to the Resistance. His callsign is JN-4002.” His expression went gentler. “I will bet you a whole batch of wah that he is either the son or grandson of Tito’s older brother.”

“Show me that holopic,” Norasol said, smacking Etto’s arm.

Etto pulled it up again, which made Kes go a little farther off and even tinnier. “You’re looking at the picture, yeah?” he said. “I know I’m right and you know I’m right.”

Norasol had never before this moment realized how much Poe resembled his paternal grandfather, in his face and features. This boy was even more strikingly similar in appearance to Molo, who’d been about this age when Kes had been born. Tito’s father had been Molo’s brother. This boy— she’d have to look at his hands and read his eyes to tell, but he was somebody’s son all right, maybe grandson. There was no question he was from that bloodline.

“He’s right,” she said resignedly.

“I will be home to cash in on that bet in four days,” Kes said. “You’d better get going. Rodia will help, she’s been wanting you to teach her to cook some of those dishes, you know. You’ll want a party, I promise, it’s mostly good news. The parts that aren’t good news is that we’re probably all going to die, so we might as well use up all our nice things anyway.”

“He’s right,” Norasol said, rubbing her forehead. “Etto, he’s right, this is terrible.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Kes said, and reached out, waving a hand, looking up at someone. The holorecording cut out.

“We _might_ not all die,” Etto said, a little forcedly.

“Everyone dies,” Norasol said. “Go get Rodia for me, and Nessa. I have to make a shitload of tamal.”

 

______

 

 

The formal holo was a little more polished. It opened on Kes, composed, standing full height, impeccably groomed and dressed in a clean jacket and trousers with heavy boots.

“This message is for the Harbor Council, and the people of the Yavin system. This is Kes Dameron, of your Harbor Council, speaking to you from a planet where the Resistance has won a battle against the First Order.”

He paused, to let that sink in, raising his eyebrows and lowering his chin. “It was only a skirmish, but it has escalated the conflict, and underscores that the time for neutrality is past. We must act decisively to defend ourselves. I participated in this mission with the understanding that my involvement would signal an end to the neutrality that the Yavin system has heretofore maintained in this conflict. Henceforth, Yavin is aligned with the Resistance, led by General Leia Organa.”

He tipped his head back a little, squaring his shoulders, and let out a breath, expression solemn but determined. “Neutrality was our only defense,” he said, “but the destruction of the entire Hosnian system illustrated for us very vividly that neutrality is not safety. There is no safety in staying uninvolved. The time when that could have been considered any kind of shelter is past.”

He’d had his hands at his sides, but he brought them up now, lacing his fingers together in front of his chest, looking down at them. “I know everybody knows I was in the Rebellion,” he said. “I know that, people talk about it all the time. But I don’t know how many people know that before that, I was a refugee. My family came from a dying planet and sought political asylum on Alderaan. I grew up with a lot of hard lessons. And the first thing I learned is that nothing is safe and nothing is sacred.”

He looked up, first from under his eyebrows in a heavy glance, and then raised his head to continue. “So this message is for all of you, in the Yavin System: I need you to prepare. I need you to understand that we have no choice, and we need to prepare. The first thing you have to do is to decide, in your heart, whether you try to look somewhere else for safety, or whether you stay and fight. If you need to leave, no one will blame you, and I will help. But if you stay, you have more decisions to make.” He let his breath out, nodded, and looked down again.

“If you stay, you need to make concrete plans for the worst,” he said. “We will be allying with the Resistance, and they will station a ship at our harbor to protect us, but that does not mean we will be safe. The First Order, as far as we can tell, no longer has a planet-killing weapon, but they don’t need one to annihilate us.” He looked up, straight into the holocorder. “Yavin is small and Yavin is fragile. One star destroyer with normal armament would take less than a day to destroy us. Three shots from a cannon and the space station is unusable, everyone on it dead. Six shots and every settlement on Yavin IV is destroyed. Another five shots and the rest of the settlements in the system are demolished. They don’t have to destroy a planet to destroy us. We are weak and we are defenseless.

“So,” he said heavily, after a short pause. “I tell you this not to frighten you, but to convince you: you need to make plans. You need to prepare. Liquidate what assets you can, and store your credits offworld. Prepare to send your children away, if you have anywhere to send them. Decide what you can give up, and what you’d rather die than lose, and make your plans accordingly.”

He leaned in, intense. “I have not made this decision lightly,” he said. “But I have lived through this before, and I know what is at stake. The most important thing is that you know, in your heart, who you are and what you can survive, and you prepare to survive it.”

There was a pause, and he let out a breath, his aspect softening somewhat. “Fronteras has agreed to set aside any of their inter-clan affairs, and ally unreservedly with us. Their network will be at our disposal for asset dispersal, evacuations, and transport, especially of children, and of livestock. Essin clan’s patriarch Etto, who you know because he has been acting as Harbormaster, has assigned representatives to every district to help in the evacuation plans. Please understand, Fronteras is putting aside many of their own very serious concerns to help us in this, and this assistance is not given lightly. Please be respectful, and understand that now is not the time to exercise old grievances.”

He paused again, looking tired but resolute. “I am truly sorry,” he said, “to have had to make this choice. But I came here with the authorization of the Harbor Council, and our collective best interests in mind. The last thing I will urge you to do, in your planning, is to make your plans for after this is over. Tell your children in secret where to meet you, or where you will find them, whether the worst happens or not. Even if all is lost, someday someone will rise from the ashes to continue. Do not despair. Try, where you can, to leave something for the survivors. They will persevere. It may be that most of us survive, and can resume the lives we are leaving now. It may be that we don’t. But life will continue. Make what preparations you can, and in the meantime, we will fight together, and accomplish what we can.”


	2. Spiritually-Fulfilling Threesome

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is only about 3/4 my usual chapter length but I just couldn't wait for the rest to fall into place; I couldn't hear them anyway over the banging together of pots and pans and chants of "THREESOME" in my head.

Finn was having a really, really pleasant dream. Captain Phasma had praised him, which wasn’t really unusual, but what was unusual is that the others hadn’t seemed to begrudge him the praise. Slip slapped him on the back and said, “I knew you could do it,” and then Bolt said “Who ever said Stormtroopers can’t shoot?” and Finn was laughing about that, and Kes Dameron, in officer’s blacks but still with his own non-regulation facial hair, said “I told you we wouldn’t leave you behind,” and Finn suddenly was worried because he remembered he’d been hurt but he didn’t remember whether Poe had been upset at him about it.

It started to collapse, then, as dream-logic did in the face of a return to consciousness, inconsistencies crumbling under their own weight as his conscious mind sought to correct them, and so when Finn opened his eyes he wasn’t really disoriented at all. Except that he wasn’t sure where he’d left off, really, and he had the nagging sense he’d left the action in the middle very much undecided and therefore had no way of knowing how it had turned out. 

Fortunately, Dr. Kalonia came in just as he was finally prying his eyes open, so clearly, he’d been under monitoring. His eyelids were quite gummy, and he immediately said, “How long was I under?” because it could have been quite a while, could have been days, there was no telling how much time he’d lost. 

She beamed at him. “Well, good morning, Finn,” she said. “How long were you under? It can’t be more than twelve hours. Maybe eighteen. I can get the exact number if you want. But you only fell asleep yesterday, it’s not that long. You haven’t even missed lunch entirely.”

“Oh good,” Finn said. He took a moment, then, and looked around. It was a small room, and if there were windows they were covered. No obvious exits except for the door, which Kalonia had left open onto a quiet dim hallway. “What’d I miss?”

“Ahh,” she said, considering it, but her general demeanor was cheerful, so it couldn’t have been bad. “Let me see. Well, the First Order mostly escaped, but we did get a tracker on one of their ships, so we have more information about their retreat than they think we do. For now, we’re holding the planet, and the local government has aligned itself with us. We’re getting alliance offers from neighboring planets, which is all well and good, but we’re not sure how we’re going to protect them all. We’re also getting defectors and recruits left and right, at an even more staggering pace than we already were, so that’s pretty great. It’ll be hard work screening them all, but we’ll manage.” 

She was checking over all the readouts on his sensor panel, on the wall, and he didn’t have the angle to see them. It struck him that he could probably sit up and look, but his body had a slept-too-long kind of heaviness that made him reluctant to move until he’d really had a chance to assess the damage.   
“Let’s see,” she went on, coming over and switching on her handheld scanner to look him over directly. “You probably want to know about your friends. Rey came back all right from her crazy chase, she was just really tired, so she’s been asleep next door to you for this whole time. There’s nothing wrong with her and she’s not at all injured. Poe also wasn’t at all injured; I checked him all over, and it’s the damnedest thing, but while there are lingering signs of the damage the rhyndolatum did to him, there are no remaining symptoms to speak of. I put him to bed and he slept a long time, and I keep meaning to get him in for a really thorough examination today, but he’s been out and about and all around and there’s no slowing him down.”

“What about BB-8?” Finn asked, remembering only his nagging feeling that he ought to know something.

“BB-8 is fine,” Kalonia said. “Ey actually spent a while going through the databanks here, I’m not sure what ey was doing, I should probably find out. But ey seems to be none the worse for wear for all eir adventures. Although, really, I’m a doctor, not a mechanic, I don’t really know what droids consider good health.” And she laughed. 

“You seem in really good spirits,” Finn observed.

“I am,” she said. “We had very low casualties and I wasn’t expecting such good fortune. Not for an operation on this scale.”

“Well,” Finn said. “That’s nice, then. I’m glad.” He smiled at her, and then remembered something else. “Oh. Bolt! Is he all right?”

Kalonia made a face he couldn’t parse. “I think so,” she said. “I can’t explain what happened to him, either, but the worst of his physical symptoms have all just--  _ vanished _ . There are some lingering aftereffects but he’s in astonishingly good health, given that he ought to have died of organ failure. Oh, he came and tried to see you. He’s extremely concerned about being punished for what he had to do to get himself here. I tried to reassure him that no one here would hurt him, but of course, I don’t have any say in military discipline except in evaluating if someone is healthy enough to receive it. So I wasn’t able to lay all his fears convincingly to rest. I think he wanted to come to you because he thought you might understand what he’d been trying to do.”

“Are they going to punish him?” Finn asked, pushing himself up-- that was enough to get him to sit up. Of course Bolt had committed all kinds of subterfuge and sabotage to get here, and that was  _ definitely _ Finn’s problem to deal with. Shit, the others--  _ all  _ the defectors--

Kalonia shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “I strongly doubt it, but you know I don’t go to the meetings about that stuff. I sent a message to General Organa, and she didn’t respond in full but she did indicate that he isn’t to be held under restraint or anything. He’s free to come and go as he pleases.”

Finn had contemplated the seriousness of his responsibilities before but this was the first time he’d actually really felt the physiological weight of command, as it settled on his shoulders again. He wasn’t injured anymore, only the faintest twinges where the injury site had been and a weird hollow-sick feeling of artificial blood diluting his real blood, but the feeling of responsibility pressed down across his chest and on his shoulders and he rubbed his face. “I gotta debrief him,” he said, “and try to get word back to the others about the rest of the defectors. I gotta deal with them, I think that’s on me.”

“Teeny and Dara are here,” Kalonia said, and Finn blinked at her.

“How?” he asked, frowning, completely baffled and a little horrified.

“As soon as Arana came around, the others turned themselves in,” Kalonia said, “and those two came with Ackbar and reinforcements, because they knew General Hux would be here and Ackbar decided that meant it was likely that the First Order would come in greater force than we anticipated. It turned out to be an unfounded fear, but it was still handy that he came, because we’ve got to restructure our forces anyway. We’re setting up overt bases instead of just covert ones, now; this planet is one, and then we’re expanding into the Yavin harbor as well, so we’ll have a space station.”

Finn had heard of Yavin before but couldn’t remember why. “Oh,” he said. That would solve some logistical headaches.

“So take a few moments,” Kalonia said, “and rest, and have something to eat, and we’ve got you some clean clothes. And then you can start to figure out what still needs to be done.”

Finn let his breath out, a soft rush of air that shaped itself into a rueful little laugh. “Okay,” he said. He rubbed at his eyes, still a little gummy, and yawned. “You said Rey is still asleep?”

It was like she’d been listening for her name, or something; deep under his awareness, something blinked, and then Rey’s Force-presence nudged at him questioningly. “Oh,” he said. “I think she’s awake now.”

There was movement in the hallway, and Rey appeared in the door, looking sleepy and bleary, hair disarranged and falling out of the braid it had been in-- the braid Poe had done for her, Finn remembered. “Hi,” she croaked. 

He laughed in delight. “Hi,” he said. 

Kalonia looked at Rey, then looked between the two of them, and laughed. “I’ll let you two catch up,” she said. “Just call out if you need me, I’ll be down the hall.”

She left, and Rey blinked owlishly after her, then pushed the handle to shut the door, and came across the room, climbing onto the bed. “You’re all right,” she said wonderingly, and put her hand unerringly to the place where there were still a couple of bacta patches adhered to the fresh skin. Finn was wearing a loose wrap tunic he didn’t remember putting on, and no trousers at all, but he could see there was a stack of clothing folded neatly on a chair, so he wasn’t worried. 

“So are you--?” he said, but made it a question, and he hesitated, hands hovering as he decided whether there were any injuries he should avoid.

“I’m fine,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck, so he put his arms around her waist and pulled her in. She was a pleasant weight in his lap, and smelled of ozone and disinfectant and herself. After a moment she untucked her chin from against his shoulder and pulled back a little, putting her hand against the side of his face, and kissed him. 

She had such a soft mouth, and a smooth face, and it sent Finn’s heart rate skyrocketing for a moment before it settled down, somewhat higher than it had been. She kissed him for a moment, soft and exploratory, before pulling away and smiling at him. 

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” she answered, grinning with a shy kind of delight that warmed him straight through. He remembered, now, being with her and Poe-- 

“Did-- did Poe get his memories back yet?” he asked. He didn’t know where that had been left off. He’d been in too much pain to really feel able to contribute to the last conversation he remembered about this.

Her smile vanished, and she shook her head solemnly. “Luke wouldn’t let me near him, and then I went away, and when I came back I was so exhausted I don’t actually remember coming here.”

“Oh,” Finn said.

“So the last time I saw him, you were there,” she said. “I don’t know--”

“Oh,” Finn said. “The trap Kylo Ren left wasn’t-- really a trap. So. I think it’s safe now. It’s-- a bit hazy, though, I think we’d have to ask Luke.”

“Luke,” Rey said, and her expression went distant. Finn was going to ask what she was doing, but he felt the ripple echoing back through the Force: Luke. She’d called out to him.

A little chime sounded on the door, and Rey slipped off the bed and went over to it, pushing the handle so it slid open. It wasn’t Luke, Finn could feel that. But he wasn’t expecting that when the door slid open, it would be Poe standing there.

“Hi,” Poe said, looking nervous and miserable and uncertain. “Kalonia said you were both awake.”

Rey stood back, biting her lip as she invited him in with a gesture. “Luke’s coming,” she said quietly. 

“Come here,” Finn said, holding a hand out, needing to smooth the unhappiness out of Poe’s face. “Come and see me, please, let me see you.”

Poe came and stood awkwardly next to the bed, clearly nervous. Finn pushed the covers out of the way so he could put his feet on the floor and give himself enough extra reach to pull Poe in and embrace him, feel the solidity of his body and satisfy himself that Poe was in one piece and all right. 

Poe hesitated for an instant, but then put his arms around Finn and held him. “Kalonia said you were healed,” he said, after a moment.

“She said you were too,” Finn said, and tipped his head back, raising a hand to touch Poe’s face, holding him steady to look into his eyes. They were steady, too, unmoving and dark and stable. It came back to him, then, how he’d found Poe in the Force and pulled him back from the echoes, from oblivion, how close he’d held him. “Poe,” he said, but he didn’t really have words for any of it.

“You should get dressed,” Rey said to Finn, breaking the spell after he didn’t know how long a moment like that, “people are coming.”

“Oh, yeah,” Poe said, pulling away. He spotted the stack of folded clothes and went to retrieve them, pulling himself out of Finn’s grasp. Poe was making a heroic effort to avoid looking at Rey, awkward and subdued and uncertain. 

And Rey had retreated to a corner of the room, confused and sad. 

Finn pulled his trousers on hastily as he heard a voice in the hallway-- unmistakably Kes Dameron’s voice, saying something about interruptions. “I very much doubt that,” Luke answered more clearly, and Finn skinned out of the wrap tunic and was pulling a clean shirt over his head as Luke came into the room. 

Poe had stationed himself with his back to the wall, like he expected someone to come at him. Finn settled the lower hem of his shirt, and looked from Poe to Luke to Rey. “So what’s the prognosis?” he asked. 

“It’s safe,” Luke said. He went to Poe, who set his jaw bravely and tipped his head back like he was expecting something terribly painful to happen. But Luke just took him by the shoulder and guided him to sit down on the bed. 

“You look tired, sir,” Poe said. 

“I’m rested enough,” Luke said. “Thank you.” He looked over at Rey, then back at Poe, considering. “Yesterday you conceded that you wanted your memories back.”

“I did,” Poe said, and he was so clearly pasting on a brave face that Finn wanted to cry for him. He looked resolute and terrified. 

Kes Dameron loomed in the doorway for a moment, leaning nonchalantly on one side of the frame. He said something in a language Finn didn’t know, presumably Iberican, and Poe looked shocked, then annoyed, but the annoyance was shaded slightly with humor. “Papa,” Poe said.

“I’m just saying,” Kes said, in Basic, and gestured with one finger at both Finn and Rey.

“Don’t be an _ ass _ , Papa,” Poe said, certainly pretending to more indignation and less amusement than he truly felt. 

It had worked; he looked less terrified, and a little more resigned. Kes pointed at him and clicked his tongue as he closed one eye, pushing off from his lean with his shoulder, and said something else in presumably-Iberican. Finn caught, this time, that it ended with Poe’s name. 

Poe rolled his eyes slightly, and set his mouth. Kes leaned into the room a little, and said, “We’ll just be down the hall,” and glanced right over at Finn. It took Finn a frozen moment to realize that what Kes meant by that was to extend reassurance to  _ him, _ too, like Finn was someone whose wellbeing additionally and separately concerned him. 

“Oh,” Finn said, belatedly; Kes had already stepped back out of the room and turned. Leia was behind him, and smiled at Finn, and caught the other two in her glance as she too stepped back and followed him. 

He turned to Luke, who was smiling a little, looking less tired. “It’ll be all right, Poe,” Luke said. “That was what he said, wasn’t it?”

Poe laughed. “ _ No _ ,” he said. 

“It’s what he meant,” Luke said blithely. “Now. Here’s the situation. Kylo Ren seems to have manipulated the Force to heal you, the way Rey and I had been trying to do, by a mechanism I don’t fully understand. I’m still not sure that he didn’t inflict damage on you, but I have been able to determine that there are no traps or otherwise destructive traces lingering.”

“He told me a lot of things,” Poe said, eyebrows drawing together. His eyes cut to one side, like he was trying to remember something, and then, quieter, he said, “You and Rey were trying to heal me?”

“Do you remember being in the Millennium Falcon?” Luke said.

Poe cast his eyes upward a little, gaze going distant. “Yes,” he said slowly. 

“We pulled memories back to nearly that point,” Luke said, “so it might be a little hazy. But if you remember, at all, that’s what Rey is going to do now, she’s going to extend herself into your consciousness like that. She has to do it, Poe, because she was the one who took your memories out in the first place. But what I want you to understand is this: you chose to have her do it because you trusted her more, because of what happened during the memories she removed. So if you consider it from that perspective, I hope that can make it less frightening to you.”

Poe looked over at Finn first, for some reason. Well, probably because he remembered Finn. So Finn nodded encouragingly. “It’s true,” he said. “I was there when you made the choice.”

Poe’s face crinkled up in a grimace. “I just can’t-- it’s so weird not to remember it  _ at all _ ,” he said. But he managed to move his gaze from Finn’s face over to Rey, who was still in the corner, and had her arms wrapped tightly across her chest and her shoulders pulled in, her face set in a neutral expression that was almost a glower. 

“I can’t blame you for being afraid of me,” she said, a little haltingly, eyes on the floor. “I don’t want to do anything you don’t want. But I  _ promised _ you, and I don’t like to break promises.”

“No no,” Poe said, ardent with concern, “I do-- I do want you to-- keep your promise, I just-- I just am. It’s weird, is all, and I’m not.” He paused, chewing his lip as he groped for the right word. 

“So it’s best we get it over with,” Luke said, “because the longer we wait, the more likely it is that the transfer won’t go smoothly and you won’t get everything back.” 

“Of course,” Poe said. He took a deep breath, and let it out, purposely relaxing his shoulders. “So what do I do?”

“I’m going to suggest that you sit here,” Luke said, pointing, “and Rey sits here, and I’m going to ask Finn to sit here,” and he gestured to a spot behind Poe, “and maybe keeps his hands on your shoulders or something for support.”

They arranged themselves, Poe and Rey facing one another with their legs criss-crossed in front of themselves, and Finn sat with his hip pressed against Poe’s back and his arms around Poe’s waist, as it was easier for him to fit that way. He tucked his chin over Poe’s shoulder and listened for his heartbeat, which was a little too fast. 

Rey took both of Poe’s hands in hers, and Luke stood next to them, looking soft and a little grim. “I’m going to get this started and then leave,” he said, “because firstly, I don’t want to influence it, and secondly, I’m damn sure that some of what you’re going to get back is private and none of my business.”

Poe turned his head and gave Luke a look. “Not you too,” he said. 

“Not me too what?” Luke asked, frowning.

“Papa won’t stop implying that Rey and I have some sort of sordid sexual history,” Poe said. 

Finn snorted, surprising himself, and buried his nose in Poe’s shoulder to hide his laughter. “Oh,  _ what _ ?” Poe demanded.

“Nothing,” Finn said. “I just-- _ nothing _ .”

Rey was fighting to keep her expression flat, though her eyebrows had pulled in a little anxiously. Finn could tell from the feeling of her that she was torn in several directions-- anxiety, fear of rejection, amusement, sympathy, irritation. “Don’t,” she said, pleading, “don’t make-- it’s not a joke! It’s like talking about someone behind their back, Finn.” 

“I’m sorry,” Finn said, fighting down giggles. “I’m-- you’re absolutely right, it’s not funny, we’ve just been under so much stress that I can’t-- I can’t help it.”

“I can’t tell if it’s funny because it  _ is _ or it  _ isn’t _ true,” Poe groused.

“Wait and see,” Rey said serenely. “Now, look at me, Poe. Finn, focus.”

“Yes ma’am,” Finn said meekly into Poe’s shoulder (Poe smelled great, like clean clothes and a recent shower and also like the way his skin tasted), and rested his cheekbone against Poe’s trapezius muscle instead. When he breathed out, his breath moved the hair on Poe’s neck, and Poe shivered, just a little. 

“I’m not going to watch this,” Luke said, but he sounded amused. “Finn, I don’t know how well you can focus, but if you can get into a meditation space for this it would undoubtedly be helpful.”

“Right,” Finn said, and closed his eyes. He wasn’t practiced at it, but it wasn’t difficult, with Poe’s body so warm and familiar, and his own body so well-rested; after a moment’s concentration, he slid part of his mind easily sideways, and was aware of his body with part of himself, and aware of the warm glow of everyone’s souls with another part of himself. 

“There you are,” Rey said, not out loud, and she was settling down from her earlier anxious misery. Poe was a faint presence, not really aware of them, but as Luke faded backward out of the room, Rey spread herself out against the surface of Poe’s mind. 

“Let her in,” Finn murmured, pressing his lips against the base of Poe’s neck, “you’re safe, I have you.”

Poe shivered again, and Finn could feel, somehow, his eyes slipping closed, the column of air moving through his chest, the thud of his heartbeat and the loosening of his shoulder muscles, and Rey’s essence rippled warm and soft against him, and she pushed gently, so gently, into his mind. 

_ I have kept this for you _ , Rey said silently, more like the words floating directly across rather than abstracted into soundwaves. And Finn could see it, the interior of that little ship, swaying sickeningly, and Rey’s face, lit up with amusement at something, Poe’s own laughter, impressions and shadows and sensations unspooling as they unfurled back into their correct places. Rey’s weight, warm across his thighs, as she sat in his lap. 

Rey’s hands in his hair. Rey’s fingers, wrapping through his hair, and pulling, and Finn groaned out loud at how good that memory felt, feeling Poe’s body move with how good it felt. The memory uncurled, filling the available space; Finn was vaguely aware that there were other memories wrapped up in there and they were all filing themselves away, but he was busy with this one, following it through to the climax, the catharsis, tears and reassurance and the overwhelming wash of relief and warmth that followed.

He opened his eyes, coming back into his body, and Rey was pressed against the front of Poe, arms around his neck, one hand in his hair and the other around the back of Finn’s head. Poe had tears down his face, head tipped up to look at Rey. She was in his lap. 

“Rey,” Poe said, staring up at her, “I’m sorry, it must have hurt you so much when I rejected you.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said. “Don’t be sorry.” 

She kissed him, then, and Finn kissed the side of Poe’s neck, and Poe made a heartfelt low sound in his chest and squirmed between the two of them, in a way that made it perfectly clear he wasn’t trying to get away. 

“Did Luke shut the door,” Poe panted, after a moment. 

Rey glanced over. “Yes,” she said, and leaned down to kiss Finn. 

Poe wiped his face, and Finn tightened his grip in case Poe was trying to leave. But he could tell, just from the feel of him, that he wasn’t. He’d also gotten a whopping dose of Poe’s point of view, having spectated all the memory restoration, and it was taking him a moment to really sort through it and reconcile Poe’s take on things with his own memories.

For one thing, Poe was a whole lot less confident in himself than he came across, and so an awful lot of things Finn had assumed were givens were, in Poe’s mind, clearly not. 

“I know what you mean,” Rey said, pulling back a little, and turning her attention to Poe. 

Finn turned his head and fastened his mouth onto Poe’s neck, and Rey slid her hands into Poe’s hair. Poe moaned softly. 

“That was really hot,” Finn said after a moment, with the smell and taste of Poe’s skin filling his mouth and nose and most of his awareness. “The memory with the-- pulling your hair.”

“You felt so  _ good _ ,” Rey said, fervent. “I-- that was the first time I understood what it was that all that fuss is about.”

“Really,” Finn said, and they were all still so open and connected that he felt it, then, when she pushed that sense of dawning revelation toward him. 

“Wow,” Poe said. “I mean, I knew that but I didn’t--  _ know _ that.”

They basked in that for a moment, mutually, and Finn pulled up as vivid a memory as he could manage of that last time he’d been with Poe, sucking marks into his body, the way he’d cried out, and Poe squirmed in what Finn could now read as a mixture of arousal and embarrassment. 

“Beautiful,” Rey breathed, as Finn brought up a vivid sense-memory of the sharp scent of semen, the glisten across Poe’s bruised torso; he was turned-on, remembering it.

But in this context now he could see what he’d missed at the time, how badly Poe had needed comfort from him, not just stimulation. 

“No,” Poe said, squirming, “Finn, it’s fine, it’s-- you didn’t screw up, I should’ve talked about that with you.”

“We don’t need these words right now,” Finn said softly, and bit down lightly on Poe’s neck, making him squirm far more pleasantly. “I understand. We’ll use words later.”

“Let’s,” Rey said, picking up her head and looking around. She pulled herself inward, and Finn realized she was closing them off from the rest of the world a little bit, keeping them from broadcasting all this mutual self-discovery quite so widely. 

“Good idea,” Finn said, and then he stuck his mouth back to Poe’s neck and sucked, and Poe groaned, losing the power of speech entirely. 

 

But this time Poe didn’t lie there and let them work him over. This time he managed to get enough control over himself to take charge, and Finn let him. Rey still wasn’t sure how or whether to directly involve her body in sex, so she sat close enough to hold Finn’s hand, and watched in rapt fascination as Poe did some things to Finn with his mouth that Finn had never experienced before. After a brief eternity of this Finn was so turned-on he was almost crying, begging Poe to-- do  _ something _ , he wasn’t even  _ sure _ what he wanted. 

“Fuck him,” Rey said, and Finn could feel her little guilty start as she remembered she’d gotten that from a really glitchy porn holo. 

“Do you want that?” Poe asked, coming up for air; his fingers were in Finn now, where his tongue had been, and Finn was shuddering intermittently from the unfamiliar stimulation. 

“Yes,” Finn said, “I-- please-- yes-- please!”

Poe looked a little bit smug, and Finn was too far gone to give him any lip about it. Poe wiped his face, and directed Rey with practiced ease to the little prepackaged toiletries kit over by the wall, that he’d somehow known would be there, and the little packet in it that proved to be lubricant, and Rey scrambled back with it and sat, raptly, on the edge of the bed, and Finn had just enough self-possession to reach over and touch her.

She shivered, and put her hands around his; she didn’t want him to touch her body, like he was offering to with his gesture, so he just took her hand instead. 

Poe went slow, a lot slower than Finn had when it had been his turn to do this, but it was good, it was a lot, it was kind of overwhelming, and Finn stared blankly at the ceiling and breathed hard and tried to get control of his body.

“Does it hurt?” Rey whispered. 

“No,” Finn said, “it feels-- it’s a lot-- and it-- it’s good.”

Rey shook her head slightly, and Finn wasn’t sure what she could see, but he did notice she kept pressing her thighs together, like she was holding something in maybe. Poe pushed gently, gently, the last little distance, and pressed his forehead against Finn’s shoulder, then turned his head slightly to look at Rey.

“You could touch yourself,” he said. “If you like how it looks.”

“Mm,” Rey said uncomfortably, and squirmed, but after a moment let go of Finn’s hand with one of hers, and pressed the heel of it against herself, squirming again.

Finn had never really had any kind of sexual contact with a female-type human, at all; he’d seen instructional holovids and some snippets, here and there, of more salubrious ones, and he’d heard plenty of discussion of the matter, so he knew approximately what it would entail. But he had no concrete notion of what it would be like for Rey. 

“It’s all right, baby,” Poe said, low and soft, voice rumbling against Finn’s shoulder, and Finn wasn’t sure which of them he was speaking to. “Just feel it, I know you can feel it.” He was breathing hard, pressed up against Finn, and Finn made a little whimpering noise and wrapped his legs around Poe’s body. 

“It feels good,” Finn said thinly, and Poe laughed softly, sweetly, and started to move, tentative and experimental, looking for the right angle. He found it, after a moment, and Finn made a really undignified noise and jerked against him, throwing his head back. Rey’s hand tightened around his and he heard her gasp a little. 

“Fuck,” she whispered. 

“There you go,” Poe murmured, “just like that,” and it was like they were all entangled in one another-- sure, Poe was actually inside Finn’s body, but their minds were so connected, their heartbeats were throbbing against each other, not synchronized but in rhythm, their pleasure reflecting and compounding. 

“Fuck,” Rey said shakily, moving the hand that wasn’t wrapped around Finn’s. Finn wanted to pay more attention to her but he just couldn’t, he was pretty much at the edge of what he could take already, his entire attention taken up with Poe inside him, against him, filling him, moving in him. 

“It’s okay,” Poe said, and his voice vibrated through Finn, “stay with me.”

Rey made a breathless little noise, and Finn shivered; he couldn’t even tell anymore what sensations were in his actual body and what was just-- he was all sensation, his whole self was just given over to it, like he was flying or meditating or-- 

He was a being of pure light, pure energy, outside of time or space or matter, and for some unknowable period of time he simply existed, at peace and given over to pleasure, with no boundary between his own consciousness and those others sharing this existence with him, outside of any notion of self or time or place. 

At some point he rediscovered his heartbeat, and then he had skin again, his hand in Rey’s, Poe’s head against his neck, Poe’s breath damp and hot on his skin, and then there was sensation again, a lot of sticky warm sweatiness, Rey breathing hard and Poe laughing softly, picking his head up and kissing Finn, Finn remembered how to move his body, how to pick up his hand and touch Poe’s face, his jaw, his hair, and then Poe kissed Rey and Finn watched, warm and liquid inside, everything floating blissfully. 

Rey kissed Finn, then, and he came back to himself a little more and remembered that language existed. 

“Hey,” he said. 

She laughed. “That was amazing,” she said. 

“Wasn’t it?” Poe said, pulling away a little and sitting up. 

“Stars,” Finn said, “I don’t know what that was.”

“I don’t either,” Poe said. “But it was pretty great.” He ran his hands through his disarranged hair, and said, “I don’t know about you but I’m starving.”

“I could eat,” Rey said. 

“I don’t remember what that even means,” Finn said, “but if you give me like, half a moment to remember how my body works, I’m probably there with you.”

Poe leaned in and kissed him again. “Lie there and let me clean you up, and then we’ll see.”

 

______

 

“Oh,” Luke said, and stood up. Kes glanced over, alarmed.

“Trouble?” he asked.

“Nope,” Luke said. He brushed his hands down his sides, smoothing down his clothing, and said, “The opposite. I’m going to go be farther away.”

Kes glanced over at Leia, who was busy at her datapad, reading something. She looked up at Luke, then over at Kes, eyes crinkling in amusement. “No,” she said, “certainly not trouble,” and collected her belongings, standing up. “I think we can leave them to it.”

“Leave them to,” Kes said, standing up since everyone else was. He shook his head a little, but then thought about it for a moment. “You know,” he said, “on the one hand, I had figured this had to be where it was going, but on the other hand, I hadn’t really actually given my son that much credit.”

“Oh,” Leia said, “he’s an overachiever.” She held out her arm. “Walk with me, I think it’s clear none of them are going to need our help.”

Kes took her elbow. “My little boy,” he said, glancing back for humorous effect. “All grown up.”

Leia snorted. “All grown up,” she said.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's more but this is the part I really had promised I had to tell, so, here it is.


	3. Satisfied

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Resolutions of issues raised; resolutions for the future. Leia and Kes see about that arrangement. Poe experiments with facial hair. It's as close to a happy ending as I come.

 

Finn was looking particularly glossy and satisfied, Poe reflected with not a small amount of pride. They were standing together in front of the mirror in the ‘fresher again, and Poe remembered, maybe a lifetime ago, [standing like this next to him](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6405631). Finn met his eyes in the mirror and laughed, clearly remembering the same thing.

“I guess I know now what your hair looks like if you don’t do anything to it,” he said, and Poe touched his wild mass of curls with a rueful grimace. His beard was out of control, too. He probably had styling products back on that little ship-- he did, actually, he could remember now, his personal effects were on there-- but it was too long, too, and he’d have to do something about the animal on his face before he could begin to present his normal aspect in any way. 

“I told you,” Poe said. He contemplated the razor in Finn’s hand. But if he started, he’d be here half an hour at least trying to hack through this thicket, and he’d be razorburned to hell afterward. Finn, of course, looked impeccable, edges fine and sharp, face smooth and perfect. 

Rey came out, pink and clean, swathed in towels, and stood at the mirror next to them. “What are you doing?” she asked Finn, who had just finished rinsing the last of the foam from his face. 

“Oh,” Finn said. “Shaving.” He picked up his towel and dried his face.

She looked from his smooth face to Poe’s and back. “Oh,” she said. “You-- too?”

Finn nodded, smiling slightly. Poe leaned in and kissed his cheek. “C’mon,” he said to Rey, “let’s get dressed, and then I’ll braid your hair again if you want.”

Rey looked delighted, which warmed Poe down in his center somewhere. He was-- he sort of couldn’t believe he got to have this. Somewhere, it was going to go wrong. 

But, hell. He ought to be dead. He was going to roll with it now, all of this, because he should be dead and wasn’t, so anything was possible.

There was a lounge area, probably a former waiting room for lobbyists to the Senator whose house this had been, conveniently located between the improvised medbay and the mess hall, so Poe set himself up in a chair with Rey at his feet and a comb in his hand. Finn settled next to them, at first, but looked uneasy. 

“There were some things I had to take care of,” Finn said, and fidgeted. “But I don’t know who to report to, here.”

“What did you need to do?” Poe asked, but he wasn’t as surprised as he might have been-- he knew Finn was important. He started detangling at the ends of Rey’s hair, deft and efficient. Her hair was silky, fine and straight, very different from the kind of hair he’d learned on. 

“Mostly I need to follow up about Bolt,” Finn said. “Everything else, I mean, there’s a chain of command, if I’m indisposed there are people to deal with it, but I really think Bolt’s my problem.”

“Shit,” Poe said, sitting up a little straighter, “he’s my cousin or something.”

“Oh,” Finn said. “Yeah, Organa said that it was-- what, that close?”

Poe nodded. “Dad recognized him too,” he said. “My aunt will know for sure. She… knows things.” And then it struck him that Norasol was going to meet Finn and Rey and was probably going to love them.

It was only after he’d thought about that for a moment that he realized this meant he was going to see Norasol too, and he had to take a little moment with that, drawing the comb slowly through Rey’s hair. 

“Oh,” Jess Pava said, pausing, “hey, guys!” She was clearly on her way through to the mess hall, and looked grubby. “Hey, is Poe doing hair?”

“He’s doing mine,” Rey said, her tone a little odd-- bashful and proud maybe. 

“I didn’t know you were good at hair, Dameron,” Jess said. 

“Please,” Poe scoffed, sticking the comb between his teeth and starting to section out Rey’s hair for an elaborate woven braid. It was tricky with slippery hair like hers, but Norasol’s wasn’t so far off from this-- thicker and heavier, but straight like this, at least. “I’m like. The  _ best _ at hair.”

Jess looked a little wistful. “I never learned nice braids,” she said. “I mean, I can do simple ones, but--”

Poe took pity on her, recognizing that she wasn’t going to feel like she could ask. “I’ll teach you,” he said. “If you do one thing for me. Can you tell me where Bolt is? Finn needs to find him.”

“Oh,” Jess said, “he’s-- he was helping us load cargo. I know where he is, I can get him.”

“Thanks,” Poe said. 

“Yeah,” Finn echoed, “thanks!”

“Hey, sure thing,” she said. She tilted her head. “That’s-- really nice, Dameron. I didn’t know…” She trailed off.

Poe looked up at her. She was looking sort of wistful. Her hair was long, and thick, and glossy, and clearly well-tended, but she always wore it more or less loose, or in a simple tie. It wasn’t hard to surmise that she’d had some relative or other who’d braided it for her, and had never taught her how. There might be a sad story there, or no story at all-- sometimes no story was sadder. “I’ll do yours sometime,” he said.

Her face lit up cautiously. He’d had some awkward interactions with her in the past, and he knew she thought he didn’t like her, and he hadn’t really known how to repair that impression, or whether he should-- he was her commanding officer, after all, and they shouldn’t be chums. But he couldn’t ignore that expression. “Really?” she said. 

He smiled at her. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m good at hair. I’ll fix you up pretty sometime.”

She grinned, delighted, and rocked back as if to keep walking away. “I’ll hold you to that,” she said, and then something struck her. “Oh!” She gestured with one hand. “I met some people who knew you. They were really excited to see you. I didn’t catch anyone’s names.”

Poe considered that a moment. “From the harbor?” he asked. 

Pava nodded. “I used my awful Academy-era Iberican on them and they were very polite.”

“Aw,” Poe said, “I don’t know any polite people.” He paused, while everyone laughed, and then said, “No, I think I caught up with at least one of ‘em. Friends of my dad’s, mostly. He’s the harbor master at Yavin,” he explained to Finn, who was looking like maybe he was thinking too hard about that. “So he knows tons of cargo handlers and such.”

“Aha,” Finn said. “Yes, I was-- aware of that.” 

Rey made an interested little noise. “So,” Pava said, waving her hand, “I”ll leave you to the braiding. I’ll make sure Bolt finds you nowish, though, and then I’m gonna go clean up. I’ll hit you up later about some fancy braids, for sure!” And she flounced off, bright and cheerful, and Poe took a moment to think how nice it was to see her happy for once. She was naturally a cheerful person, he thought, and it was a pity he’d only really known her in wartime. 

Rey watched her go; Poe felt her turn her head a little to follow her. “Do you know Jess?” he asked.

“She-- she and I squashed into an X-Wing together,” Rey said. “To chase Kylo Ren. We got-- uh. It was.”

“Crowded?” Poe supplied.

“Yeah,” Rey said. “I-- but she seems nice. We were distracted.”

Poe contemplated that for a moment. “She _ is _ nice,” he said. “I think you two would get along.”

Rey was quiet, thoughtful, and he set to work on braiding her hair, humming to himself a little. 

“So,” Finn said, “I should learn Iberican.”

“Rey knows some,” Poe said. 

“No I don’t,” Rey protested. 

“Me desentegrador está descompuesto,” Poe prompted her. “Moriré sin tu amor!”

“No,” she said, covering her face with her hands. 

“What are you saying?” Finn asked, amused.

“There were these-- holodramas,” Rey said. “I scavenged chips and watched them over and over, and one of them was in Iberican, so I didn’t really understand it but I watched it so much I memorized parts of it.”

“It was a cheesy love story,” Poe said. “Extra melodramatic. The best introduction to Iberican you could ever ask for. You can start there, learn the language by watching the holo. It’s full of really useful lines like, ah, how’d it go, Rey?”

“Fuck off,” she said, hands still over her face, but she was laughing.

“No,” Poe said, “that wasn’t it. But there were definitely a lot of lines about dying without your love and so on.”

It was Finn’s gentle interest that finally coaxed a few of the more melodramatic lines out of Rey, and Poe gleefully translated while he finished braiding her hair. 

“It sounds beautiful, though,” Finn said, looking enchanted. The effects of their weird Force trance-tryst were kind of fading, Poe realized, as he had to manually squash a pang of jealousy that it was Rey Finn was looking at like that.  _ Relax _ , he told himself.  _ Remember how sincere they are. It’s fine _ .

This was going to take some adjusting to. The entire concept of thinking beyond the next moment was something Poe was pretty seriously out of practice at doing. But he hadn’t really made anyone any promises. 

He was spared from trying to put any of this into words by none other than Bolt showing up, looking exhausted and harried and frazzled but about a million times better than he had when dying in Poe’s arms. Bolt was wearing cargo loaders’ coveralls and was covered in dirt, and stopped a few paces away, staring at Finn in what really looked like frozen dread. 

Finn pushed to his feet. “Hey, Bolt,” he said, and Poe noticed he was holding his hands strangely, moving them a little in a purposeful fashion. Bolt’s gaze wavered, taking them in.

“Pava said she’d kick my ass,” Bolt said, “but I figure only you really have the authority to do that, Eff-- Finn.” He stuttered nervously over getting Finn’s name right, and his hands clenched stiffly, immobile, at his sides. 

“Nobody’s kicking anybody’s ass,” Finn said. 

“I impersonated an officer,” Bolt said, teeth gritted. “Nobody here will acknowledge how serious that is.”

“You did it under orders, though, right?” Finn tilted his head. “Dara told you to do it.”

Bolt swallowed. “Not,” he said, hoarsely, “to the extent that I did, though.”

“Come here,” Finn said, gesturing. “Sit down.” He sat down, and Bolt sat down hesitantly next to him. Finn put his arm around Bolt, and Bolt’s face went completely blank with-- surprise, perhaps; Poe wasn’t sure. “Bolt,” he said softly. “I still have to go through all the reports and things, but I want to make one thing clear: I don’t think you’re going to be disciplined, and since that decision’s up to me, I’m pretty confident about it. We will have to take a hard look at some things to determine what role you want going forward, but I genuinely don’t think you’re in any trouble.”

Bolt gave him a sidelong, disbelieving look, then looked straight at Poe, who realized he’d been staring. “That can’t be how it works here,” he said. “And Pava-- I asked around, she’s an officer.”

“Pava’s an officer,” Poe said, “but she answers to me. I don’t know the situation but I’m assuming she meant she’d kick your ass in an informal way.” 

Bolt looked skeptical. “You allow dueling among your pilots?” He shook his head a little, eyes narrowing. “It’s a bad idea, I’m just saying, but if she really wants--”

“No, no,” Poe said, a little alarmed. “No, I think she was being metaphorical.”

“No, there’s no dueling here,” Finn said hastily, then shook Bolt by the shoulders, seemingly affectionately. Poe wondered how much he’d missed. “You gotta slow your roll, Bolt, I know you’ve been trained to be pretty high-strung but you gotta lay back a little, here.”

“Nobody here knows about TIE pilots,” Bolt said, a little mournfully. “People keep startling me.”

“Oh no,” Finn said, and put his other arm around Bolt, squeezing him a bit. Bolt’s shoulders went up, but then he relaxed, a little but visibly, in the pressure of Finn’s grip. “We’ll have a little chat with some people about that. Has anybody gotten hurt?”

“Just me,” Bolt said. He sighed, shoulders relaxing even more. “Well, if I’m not getting disciplined, then I probably have to apologize to both Pava and Arana.”

 

_____

  
  


It was a very long time since anyone had really had the capacity to distract Leia Organa, but Kes Dameron was managing to do it somehow. She still had excellent coping mechanisms in place to keep it from getting out of hand, but it caught her off guard that she even had to deploy them.

He wasn’t trying to do it, she didn’t think. He was as quiet and unassumingly competent as he’d ever been. She could remember very clearly how he’d been as a child, dressed in excruciatingly formal clothing, dark and solemn behind the bird-like color of his mother’s formal costume at the audiences Queen Breha had held. Leia herself had been tiny, alive with purpose as she held the holocorder to make the formal recording of the audiences, and Kes had usually been the only other child present, so she’d been fascinated by him. 

He’d been too shy to talk to her, but at the time she hadn’t understood that, she’d assumed he knew something she didn’t. He still had the same air, though she didn’t think it was shyness anymore. He still watched everything, missed nothing, said little, and was constantly aware of her, and it meant that she was aware of him in return. 

“Dameron,” she said, catching him by the arm as he walked past on his way out of the room they’d taken over as a mess hall. He stopped, and looked down at her. “I have more questions for you about the Harbor Council. Do you know where my quarters are?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, straight-faced, but there was a slight crinkle at the corner of his eye, a little softening of the mouth at that edge. 

“Or have you not had a rest shift? I don’t want to keep you up,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, eyebrows shifting eloquently.

“Then come to me after the evening debrief,” she said. 

“Certainly, ma’am,” he said. 

“And you can catch me up on how your auntie has been,” she added, patting his hand in dismissal.

He cracked the tiniest of smiles, at that, taking a somewhat-deferential half-step backward. “Norasol remains a force of nature,” he said, and added, in Iberican, “and she has always defended you to me, I ought to tell you.”

“Oh,” Leia said, genuinely startled and pleased. “Truly?”

“Truly,” he said, nodding slightly, with a slow blink and a soft smile, and tilted his head deferentially as he took another step back, then turned and walked away. She didn’t watch him go, but turned back to Admiral Ackbar, with whom she had been engaging in a desultory conversation. 

Ackbar  _ did  _ watch Dameron go, and muttered, half to himself, “I wasn’t expecting that at all.”

“What weren’t you expecting?” Leia asked, amused. 

Ackbar shook his head slightly, a gesture she knew he’d picked up from humans; Mon Calamari didn’t natively do that. “That he’d manage to have aged so attractively,” he said. “Most humans don’t, you know.”

Leia laughed so hard she had to hang onto the table to keep from falling out of her chair. “Gial,” she said, “you have no idea.”

 

The evening debrief, of course, ran long. It was mostly just the upper-level commanders, so Kes wasn’t there, but Poe was. Poe was cleared to return to duty, but provisionally; he wasn’t clear to pilot yet, and was expressly on light duty only. Kalonia was worried his sight had been permanently affected, or would be without sufficient rest and healing. He was unusually good-natured about the limitation. Leia considered being suspicious that he was planning some sort of end-run around it, but decided that if that were true, Finn was far more qualified to prosecute the case than she, so she let it go. 

It was perfectly possible Poe was just in a good mood, for perfectly understandable reasons; he was softly radiant, both in his physical form and in the Force, little sparks still skipping through his energy. It was impossible to begrudge him any of it, and it actually proved challenging for Leia not to just beam indulgently at him every time she looked at him.

 

At long last she let herself into her room and Kes was there, lounging in the chair with his feet up on the side table, arms crossed over his chest. She had no doubt he’d been asleep, because when she opened the door he twitched slightly and blinked owlishly at her. 

“That took forever,” she said. “Sorry.”

He quirked his eyebrows dismissively, tilting his head. “I hope you don’t really want to stay up for hours talking about the Harbor Council,” he said. “I know I said I’m not concerned about getting enough sleep, but that kind of political stuff is really boring and I don’t know if I could stay awake long enough to give you a full accounting of their long slow shift from neutrality to sympathy for the Resistance, and the various alliances I’ve had to wager my reputation on. I mean, the clans of Fronteras alone--”

“No,” she said, unfastening her shoes, “I really was just making a plausible excuse to stave off the rumor mill for at least a minute.”

“Well then,” he said, and uncrossed his arms, sitting forward and removing his feet from the side table. He licked his lower lip, and grinned. “Nobody saw me come in here. Your people are pretty good, but they’re not as good as me.”

“Haven’t lost your edge, huh?” She unfastened her utility vest and hung it by the door. 

“You know I won’t outlive my edge by much,” he said. 

“Fair,” she said. She came into the room, and went over to the nightstand, pulling out her earrings and setting them down. Her hairpins followed, and she uncoiled the braid from her head and let it down her back before turning to him. 

He had his elbows resting on his thighs, leaning forward and looking up at her with his dark eyes in shadow. The only light in the room was the bedside lamp, and it caught highlights in his irises, but left most of his expression unreadable. She put her hands on her hips and looked at him for a moment. 

“I don’t know how this works,” he confessed, inscrutability collapsing into a hesitant kind of amusement. “I got married when I was twenty. I think it’s fair to say I never had the knack in the first place.”

Leia had to laugh, at that, but stepped into his space and slid her hand around the back of his neck as he leaned back to look up at her. “Kes,” she said, “there’s no trick to this. But we should talk first.” He made a face, and she laughed again. “I know, we spent the whole day talking. But I promise this is a more interesting topic.”

He tipped his head back, running his tongue along his lower lip and smiling up at her. “I know,” he said. His hands came to rest at her hips, a little tentative, his gestures’ uncertainty mirrored in the faint line that settled between his eyebrows. “I, ah. You first. What do we talk about?”

“We make sure we both want the same things,” Leia said. “It’s a nice low-intensity form of negotiation. I’m good at this kind. To start off with, I’d just like to say how pleased I am that you did as I asked and did not die for me. I appreciate that kind of effort.”

He grinned, eyes glittering in the low light. “I like to be a good boy,” he said. “Whenever possible.”

She put one hand on his shoulder, and the other into his hair. His hair was soft and thick, cut short as it ever had been, and it felt wonderful under her hand. “That’s good to know,” she said. “What else do you like?”

He shook his head slightly, gazing up at her with a deeper crease between his eyebrows. “My last first time was so long ago,” he said, “that I’m not even sure what kinds of things people negotiate nowadays.”

She bent and kissed his forehead, holding his head between her hands. “My sweet boy,” she murmured, cradling his head against her chest. “It’s the same things, only you don’t have to ask about birth control, since I’m well past that, and instead you have to figure out who has a bad hip and whether there are any significant traumatic events you have to be careful not to stir up memories of.”

“My hips are fine,” he said, doing his absolute best to keep a straight face, which lasted until she laughed.

“Good,” she said, “so are mine, though my left knee gives me problems sometimes.”

“My knees aren’t what they were,” he said, “but neither one is notably terrible. I can’t spend as long on them as I used to but I can spend long enough.”

She nodded, raising her eyebrows. “Good to know,” she said. “And now, the important question, I suppose. Well, I mean. It’s not the most important thing. I mean, it’s all right either way. But, um.” She considered how best to phrase it, for maximal amusement value. “I mean. For planning purposes, it’s good to know... whether you’ve got full… function. Of. You know.”

He blinked at her, blank. “Function,” he said. 

“It’s perfectly normal for some things to, ah. Not, ah, work exactly as they used to. At our age.”

He blinked again, and then his eyebrows went up. “Are you asking if I can get it up?” he asked. 

“Well,” she said, and by his reaction he certainly could, so now she was just teasing him. “It’s all right, you know, if not everything, ah--”

He broke first, and started laughing. “I’ll have you know,” he said, “I haven’t exactly tested the equipment under any kind of recent pressure, but it was working fine when I put it away.”

“That’s no guarantee,” she said. 

He shook his head, still laughing. “Well,” he said, “we’ll see, but you know, it’s not exactly crucial for most of the things I like to do most.”

“Oh no?” she asked, sliding both her hands into his hair again. His skin was so warm, he was so alive and vital and  _ funny _ , she had forgotten how funny he was, how intimately she  _ liked _ him, she’d always had such a good time with him on the rare occasions she’d been able to get close enough to hear him talking as himself, with no urgent or tragic business at hand. They’d had some good times, but there hadn’t been many, and now the ghosts of their companions haunted those memories.

He bit his tongue as he looked up at her. “No,” he said, voice going a bit husky, and he dropped his eyes, suddenly shy. “I-- I kind of-- I don’t know if-- if I can really--”

“Baby,” she murmured, understanding what he meant, “we can do whatever you want to do, I’m not going to expect you to do anything you’re not sure about.” It was sweeter than she cared to contemplate, both that he’d been chaste this entire time and that he felt strongly enough for her that he could overcome that, even with reservations. The fact that he’d even consider having sex with her was a pretty big deal and she knew that. She wasn’t going to push him too hard on the specifics.

He laughed, but it was self-conscious. “We’re-- old enough to be grandparents,” he said. “I’m not-- some blushing innocent--”

“There’s no rules about that kind of thing,” Leia said. “I’m not exactly going to complain. I just want to have a nice time, and I’m not going to enjoy something you don’t like doing.”

“I know  _ that _ ,” he said, squirming a little. “I’m just-- uncomfortably aware that I’m probably-- going to be inappropriately emotional, at some point.”

She had to kiss him, then, had to tilt his chin up and take his mouth with hers, filled with too much tenderness to watch him stammer any longer. “Oh, Kes,” she said softly, and kissed him again, soft and hungry. His mouth tasted like yaromint, and she smiled. “You brushed your teeth,” she said.

“I’m not a savage,” he said, breathing a little hard. “Shaved too.”

“Oh, but I like it scratchy,” she said.

“‘Swhat the little bit of beard’s for,” he said, and she laughed and kissed him again. 

“Honey,” she said, when she came up for air again, “I know we’re kind of-- having a threesome with your wife’s ghost, here, there’s no way to escape that.”

“If you don’t think I’m not uncomfortably aware of your husband’s ghost,” Kes said, and she laughed because it hurt. Kes and Han had been briefly pretty close, had worked together, had been friends. 

“So it’s an orgy,” she said. 

“We should have done that while everybody was alive,” Kes said wistfully.

“[Why ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11330394) [ _ didn’t _ ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11330394) [ we](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11330394)?” she asked. “Han talked about your ass a lot, by the way.”

“No,” Kes said, incredulous.

“Oh yeah,” Leia said. “Like, I know, everybody’s kind of bisexual, but he was really-- I actually think he mostly didn’t care for women, except for me. You were his type in spades, Kes, he couldn’t stop talking about you.”

“That’s really--  _ no _ ,” Kes said. “No, I know what it’s like when a man wants me, and he was never--” He stopped. “ _ Really _ ?”

She just nodded. Kes absorbed that for a moment. “Damn,” he said finally. “I mean-- I’m really not very into men, I’ve never actually had much interest, but--  _ Han Solo. _ ”

“Yeah,” she said. “You know, he was really good in the sack, too.”

“I’ve zero doubt,” Kes said. “I, ah. I would’ve been good to go with you at pretty much any time, too, but I never wanted to bring that up with Shara because she was pretty territorial and I don’t know how that would’ve gone over. It’s not like she wasn’t about all I could handle anyway.”

“She was a lot of woman,” Leia said, and it wasn’t just Kes’s reflected grief she was feeling, it was her own. Shara would have been a good ally to have for all of these intervening decades. Shara had been a decent person and a brilliant mind. “Also I would have loved to attempt to handle her.”

That got Kes to smile wide enough to show a flash of teeth. “I would have enjoyed that too,” he said. 

“Well,” Leia said, “we’ll have to do our best on our own, I guess.” She ruffled his short hair, enjoying the way it felt under her hands. It would curl if he grew it out, she was absolutely certain of that. She’d assumed Poe’s curls came from Shara, but with this kind of close inspection she could tell that wasn’t solely the case. “Bearing in mind that I’m fully prepared for you to get inappropriately emotional as long as you’re ready for me to do the same-- and, Kes, I don’t want you sneaking out in the middle of the night, someone might see you, it’s best if you stay until morning-- what  _ do _ you want to do?”

Kes gave her a long-suffering look as she ruffled his hair again, and she laughed, but desisted. “I guess nothing’s off the table,” he said. “On my end, anyway. I would like to put in a request, though.”

“Oh?” She was expecting something about his hair, maybe that she stop messing it up, although it was short enough not to have been noticeably disarranged by her attentions.

“I would like,” he said, gaze going indirect with shyness again, “to spend, um, as long as you’ll let me, going down on you.”

She laughed. “As long as I’ll let you,” she said. “Do people usually ask you to stop?”

“No,” he said, and his cheeks had gone hot against her hands. 

“I’m not going to say no,” she said. 

“Request number two,” he said, cutting his eyes sideways to look up at her, appealingly coy. “In bed?”

She laughed. “I won’t say no to that either,” she said. 

“In that case,” he said, and stood up, picking her up with a hand under each thigh. 

She managed to suppress her shriek of laughter, and just squeaked against his neck instead. “You,” she said, and he carried her over to the bed and carefully dumped her onto it.

“You’re so  _ little _ ,” he said. “I have always wanted to do that to you and I figured you’d murder me.”

“I would have,” she said, laughing breathlessly. “I still might!”

“Can I earn forgiveness?” he asked, leaning back to unfasten the clasps on his boots one at a time, and pull them off before kneeling on the bed. She scooted back a little, to give him room. “Can I do anything for you to convince you to spare my life after manhandling you like that?” He was grinning, bright-eyed and playful now, and she considered, for a moment, how soundproof the walls were in here. They were pretty good, as she recollected from her perusal of the building’s blueprints.

“You can try,” she said, and laced her fingers around the back of his neck, pulling him down to kiss him again. He was so big. He was so substantial. He was-- her body was  _ ready _ , holy shit. “Make with the going down and I’ll probably see my way to sparing you.”

He laughed softly, looking delighted and eager, and she took the initiative and unfastened her shirt.

He helped, hands gentle and almost reverent. She almost lost her nerve and left her breastband on, but he was so polite, so deferential, about removing it, that she let him. Her breasts were all softness now, no firmness remaining, but he seemed unmoved by that. Maybe the light was low enough to be flattering, or maybe he genuinely wasn’t bothered; he cupped them reverently in his hands, then leaned in and kissed her. 

“I don’t look like I used to,” she said, still a little self-conscious. Generally her sexual partners were around her own age, and she wasn’t overly self-conscious about age’s ravages, but somehow knowing the last person Kes had been with had been a flawless 30ish-year-old Shara was looming large in Leia’s mind.

“I mean,” Kes said, “that’s a function of linear time, I’m led to believe,” and she laughed and stopped worrying about it, and let him take her trousers off too. 

He made a gratifyingly heartfelt sound as he dropped her trousers off the end of the bed and looked down at her. He didn’t stare, but put his face down to nuzzle at her skin, breath hot across her belly. She wriggled a little, not quite ticklish, and slid her hand around the back of his neck. 

“Take your shirt off too,” she said, and he laughed and shucked it with businesslike efficiency. He was in phenomenal shape, still, bronzed from sun exposure, still muscular, if a bit ropier than when he was young. His tattoos were faded and blurry, but some of the lines were sharp, clearly touched-up with some regularity. He didn’t preen for her, or pose, but got right back down to business, grazing his teeth across the jut of her hipbone and wrapping his fingers in the waistband of her underpants to pull them down, and off. 

He breathed something fervent and gratifyingly awed, and kissed the soft squishy bit at the front of her hip, then tucked himself delightedly under one of her thighs and set to work. She lost any trace of self-consciousness at that point as she opened to the firm sure press of his tongue and fingers, confident and knowledgeable and precise.

It took almost no time at all for him to follow her cues and give her precisely what she wanted. Trusting in the soundproofness of the room, she let herself moan out loud as she shivered over the edge into a nice little orgasm. 

“Ooh,” she said, still shivering, “that was nice.”

“Not bad,” he said, “for a warmup,” and went back to work. He was gentler, though, letting her recover and get back up to speed. It took a little longer this time, but when she came again it was harder and more intense, and he backed off right away, keeping up the gentlest of pressure as she rode it out, breathing hard now. “Better,” he said. 

“Fuck,” she panted. 

He made a pleased little noise, clearly enjoying himself, and went back to work, and she almost twitched right off the bed, but he moderated himself, keeping it just shy of too intense. She shivered a bit, not entirely certain she could withstand much more concentrated attention, but as she caught up to her body’s responses she bore down against him and he stepped it up, pushing his fingers into her more firmly even as he let up on the external stimulation a bit. No, he wasn’t rusty at all, he knew what he was doing. 

She shoved a fold of the blanket into her mouth to keep from testing the room’s soundproofing too much; this next climax was building slow but intense, and she couldn’t keep from making an increasing little crescendo of heavy-breathing noises. 

“Yeah,” he murmured, “that’s it, c’mon,” and she pushed down against him, fucking herself on his hand, her body starting to go distant and out of her control. 

She let out a shuddering cry, ineffectively muffled, and came long and hard, her whole body shuddering with it this time. He had to lean back a little so as not to get hit in the face by any of her flailing, and when she next was paying attention, he was watching her with a hungry kind of delight. 

“Fuck,” she said, when she could speak. “Fuck, Kes--”

He grinned. “That working for you?” he asked. 

“Yeah,” she said, shaky. “Yeah, I-- yeah.” She held out her arms and he crawled up onto the bed and lay down next to her. 

She unfastened his trousers, and managed to find enough coordination to get them off him-- he was lean and solid, hadn’t really run to fat at all, the points of his hipbones were sharp and while there was no mistaking him for a young man, he was pretty aesthetically pleasing all around. And-- aha.

“Hey,” she said, “what do you know.”

He laughed. “I told you it was working when I put it away,” he said. He was hard, all the way hard, and she hadn’t really expected he’d have any particular issues-- he was only in his fifties, and demonstrably healthy-- which was why she’d made the joke as tastelessly as she had-- but it was still something of a pleasant surprise. Even when everything was working, sometimes it took a man of this age a little time to get going, but that didn’t seem to be the case here.

“We’ll see how well it’s working,” she said, giving him a desultory stroke through his underwear before glancing up to check his expression.

He seemed amused, and more importantly, on board, which was what she’d wanted to see. “What kind of a test were you thinking of?” he asked.

“I was thinking maybe I’d sit on it,” she said, “but I’m open to alternate suggestions.”

“No, no,” Kes said, “that sounds fine to me.” 

She laughed at his overly-nonchalant tone, and kissed him, sweet and lingering at first, but intensifying as her heart rate picked up. He was into it, he was really into it, and she worked his underwear down and off him, and put her hand around his erection. 

“So let’s do that, then,” she said finally, and pushed him over onto his back. He laughed up at her, and she had to pause, distracted even from her intent desire by how beautiful he was. She put her hand against his jaw, taking a moment to examine his face. 

She’d been with a lot of other people besides Han, and it wasn’t fair to compare them; she generally didn’t. But Kes was more than half a decade younger than Han had been, and he had clearly taken better care of himself to boot. He was salt-and-pepper, much of his hair still midnight-black, and while the corrugations at the corners of his eyes had faithfully recorded every smile, his skin hadn’t yet begun to go thin and papery. 

“You sure?” he said. 

“Yeah,” she said, and straddled him, his big hands coming up to steady her. She took her time, less reckless with her body than she had been as a young woman, and took him slowly into herself. He let her direct the action, lying still and cooperative, supporting her and looking intently interested in everything. It took her a few moments to adjust to the feeling of being penetrated; it had been a while since she’d had that kind of sex. But he waited, avid but not pushy, and at last she felt she could move.

“It’s not like being thirty,” she said. 

“It would be strange,” he said, distracted, “if it were.”

After that they didn’t talk very much; she had thought she’d come as much as she was going to and the rest of this was going to be just pleasant sensation and watching Kes get off, but her body got back on board and decided this was ideal stimulation, and she managed to find the perfect angle that made her entire spine go tingly, and Kes hung on and made wide-eyed faces of gratifying awe and wonder. 

She gave up on worrying whether anyone could overhear, and let herself go, gasping and shuddering and holding on to Kes’s shoulders. He held her by the waist, at first, but as things intensified, pulled her down and kissed her and kept his hand looped around the back of her neck, holding on as if for dear life. She came again, breathless and shaking and completely scattered; while she was still in the throes of it he followed her over the edge with an affecting little series of quiet but profound noises, clinging to her and pressing his face against her shoulder. 

She let herself collapse down onto him, wrapping her arms around him and holding him close, petting his hair while they both breathed hard. “Good?” she murmured finally.

“Good,” he answered, breathless and muffled, face still pressed into her neck, so she held him a little longer and kissed his head. 

After a little while, she ventured, “I guess it all still works well enough, then,” and he managed a laugh. 

That was enough to reassure her, so she rolled off him, wrapped herself in a sheet, and tucked herself back up against him, pulling the blankets up over them both and finding the pillows. “Stay with me,” she murmured.

“Okay,” he said. He’d predicted that he’d be emotionally vulnerable, and she suspected that was why he was keeping his face hidden. She switched off the light, and combed her fingers gently through his hair, feeling his slightly-uneven breathing against her shoulder. 

“Now you have something to report, at least,” she said finally, recognizing that he wasn’t falling asleep.

He laughed, a short and sort of broken sound. “Yeah,” he said. 

She ran her fingers delicately along the back of his shoulder. His skin was soft, and he smelled deeply familiar in ways she hadn’t realized she’d remembered. “Luke explained what happened,” she said. 

He made a noise, maybe another broken little laugh. “It was real,” he said. “It was really her.”

“That’s what Luke said,” Leia told him, eager to avoid seeming like she was questioning it.

“You want to know something awful?” Kes said, very quietly. 

“I might as well,” she answered. 

“This whole time,” he said, “I had always kind of thought, in the back of my mind, that maybe Shara had let herself get killed on purpose.”

“Oh no,” Leia said, dismayed. 

“You can maybe see how I’d’ve thought that,” Kes said. “She had trouble staying in one place, she could well have felt kind of trapped.”   
“I can see how you’d thought that,” Leia said. 

Kes shivered, very finely. “This whole time,” he said. “Just-- a little. In the back of my mind. I thought about how awful it was that she didn’t feel she had any other way out.”

“Surely that wasn’t the case, though,” Leia said. 

Kes shivered again, and took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. “No,” he said. “It wasn’t. It was so clear-- the way she reacted, just then, the things she said-- it was so clear to me that she hadn’t.”

“What a relief,” Leia said. 

“I should be relieved,” he said, very quiet and muffled. “I should be.”

Leia kissed his head, just above the hairline, where she could reach it, and dug her fingers in gently, holding him. “Relief doesn’t always feel good,” she said. Neither of them said anything for a little while; Kes wasn’t crying but he was breathing raggedly, pressed in tight against the crook of her neck, his whole body wound up tense. “I guess I’m relieved that I didn’t kill my son and fall to the Dark Side today,” Leia went on eventually. “It doesn’t feel exactly good, but I prefer it to the alternative.”

“And I guess I’m grateful that I got to kind of say goodbye to Shara after all,” Kes said eventually. 

They lay in silence a little while longer. “If you cry about it, then I can comfort you, and I’ll feel like I’m doing something constructive,” Leia suggested.

Kes laughed, a bitter but soft noise, and nuzzled in under her jaw. “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll work on it.”

She sighed pleasantly, rubbing her cheek against his hair. “It’s not really a relief,” she said into the quiet darkness as his breathing didn’t even out. “Because you could sort of bitterly console yourself that it was just as well she’d found freedom that way, and make yourself feel shitty, but there’s kind of a freedom in bitterness. This is maybe worse, because she didn’t want to go after all.”

Kes’s breathing caught, and after a moment he said, “That’s about it.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” Leia said. 

“I’d convinced myself she’d been lying to me about stuff,” Kes said. “She said maybe we should have another baby, she said maybe she’d really retire. She said all that a bunch of times, and kept going back out anyway. And I told myself it was all her trying to convince herself.”

“Oh,” Leia said. 

“So it’s not really like it’s worse,” he said, “but it’s that all the dumb shit I’ve told myself to try to feel better is all wrong.”

“I see what you mean,” she said. 

“You’ve got worse shit than that to feel bad about,” he groused, pulling away a little, but she wouldn’t let him go.

“And I don’t want to feel bad about it,” she said. “I’d rather wallow in your problems because at least those aren’t mine. I’d rather feel bad for you than feel bad for me. It’s selfish and I’m asking you to indulge me because if I have to face my own shit tonight I’ll scream.”

He subsided, and she let go enough for him to tip his head up and look at her face. Even in the dark, she could see the contrast between the whites of his eyes and his dark, dark irises. “Well,” he said, “unless we get drunk I don’t think I can manage to cry, but.”

“She didn’t really seriously say you should have another baby, did she?” Leia asked. She couldn’t square that with the Shara she’d known, who’d given her such excellent advice when she’d found herself pregnant. “She said so many times what bullshit it all was.”

Kes leaned in and kissed her. “She said we should adopt one,” he said. “She couldn’t-- anyway, I didn’t think she was serious.”

“Adopt one,” Leia said, rubbing her thumb across his cheekbone. “Did she really?”

“I told myself it had to have been her trying to convince herself,” Kes said. “That she didn’t really believe a word of it.”

“You can’t have really believed that,” Leia said. “Shara wasn’t the type to delude herself about things.”

Kes’s eyes weren’t quite closed. “No,” he said finally. 

“Han did shit like that,” Leia said. “But Shara wouldn’t have.”

“No,” Kes said. His eyes were closed now. Leia pulled him in closer again, tucking his head under her chin, and he wrapped his arms around her midsection. 

“I loved him, and he meant well,” Leia said, “but he was often a victim of wishful thinking. Shara was not.”

“She got… strange, later on,” Kes said. “I couldn’t always understand what she was thinking.”

“But she wouldn’t have lied,” Leia said. “And she didn’t leave you on purpose.”

“She didn’t,” Kes answered, barely a whisper.

They stayed like that in silence for a while, and improbably enough, Leia slid off into sleep. 

 

She woke up alone, daylight slanting through the window curtains. Her chrono told her she wasn’t late for breakfast. Her memory told her there might be rumors to account for. And her common sense told her Kes had certainly obeyed her and stayed until morning, and knowing him, no one had seen him leave. 

  
  


_______________

  
  
  


“What the fuck,” Kes said, stopping dead in the entryway to the hangar they were using to stage all the stuff that was going onto the cruiser headed for Yavin. 

Poe was sitting on a box, playing guitar, which was lovely and nostalgic and all, but he had at some recent point carved the dead-animal beard off his face and left behind a [truly enormous tragic moustache](https://68.media.tumblr.com/f024fcda82a4a2b71b5d3cf82ff59ed5/tumblr_inline_otmfneOY4S1qfgj41_540.jpg). 

Poe saw Kes’s reaction and laughed so hard he almost fell off the box, entirely abandoning the song he’d been singing. “Papa,” he said finally, wheezing, “you don’t get to lecture me about stupid facial hair.”

“What the fuck is that!” Kes said, gesturing. “It’s trying to eat your nose! You look like the unsavory organized-crime uncle in a holonovela from the old Republic! What the fuck have you done to your beautiful face?”

Rey was sitting next to him and appeared completely delighted by the entire exchange. Kes had been speaking Basic for her benefit, and was pleased to see it had paid off. “Meanwhile you have a woolamander stuck to your chin by its spine,” Poe said, gesturing. 

“At least I caught it fair and square,” Kes said. “I killed this thing with my own hands thirty-five years ago, I’ll have you know,” and he gestured at his own chin. He’d considered changing his facial hair at various points, but muscle memory usually took over after not very long of growing it out or shaving it off, so it always went back the way he’d had it before. He was pretty immune to teasing about it by now. “Yours is sentient and is planning on a brain takeover, I can tell you that right now.”

“The old man is wise,” one of the cargo loaders said, and Kes did a double-take.

“Marya!” he said. She was an Essin clan member, one of Etto’s close relatives, and Kes had known her for her entire life, had attended her naming ceremony. She was a couple years older than Poe, and had lived on Yavin IV for a little while as an adolescent, staying with Norasol to apprentice to her and learn herbal workings.

“Kes,” she said, and he embraced her, kissing her temple. “I saw your speech, good speech.”

“Ah,” Kes said, and waved a hand dismissively. He didn’t feel like talking politics, and he knew he didn’t have to, not to Marya. He gestured at Poe instead. “Look at this tragedy! Just when I thought maybe my boy could get laid, he is doing this to himself.”

“You don’t think he’s doing it  _ to _ get laid, do you?” Marya asked shrewdly. 

Poe made an innocent face. “Well,” he said. “As it happens, we were teaching Rey about how to use a razor, and I didn’t think she was up to managing the upper lip area.”

Kes regarded him, then looked at Marya, shaking his head in disgust. “Say what you will about me,” he said, “I have never done anything stupid with my appearance just to impress a girl.”

“If you had,” Marya said, “I am not old enough to call your bluff.”

Kes looked at her. “No,” he said, suddenly tired, “everyone who is old enough is dead, except your uncle Etto.” He held out his hand for her datapad. “Let me see that.”

She pulled it closer to herself for a moment. “You’re not harbormaster here,” she said, giving him a skeptical eyebrow. 

“Xacristo, I’m just trying to find out what’s going on,” Kes grumbled. Marya relented and handed him the datapad. The manifests were the kind of thing he was so used to looking at that the interface gave him no trouble-- he knew the shape of a manifest, knew what to expect, and so he only had to pay attention in a couple of spots, only had to pin down a few letters here and there to make it out. 

They were bringing food provisions, a lot of them, enough to support themselves for a time, which was extremely good, because Kes knew Yavin was largely self-sufficient but didn’t have a ton extra when it came to that sort of thing. Especially not if some of the food producers sold out and got offworld, as he’d advised them to. 

“Does it meet with your approval?” Marya asked, cool and sarcastic, and Kes realized that she was actually nervous, actually thought he might disapprove of her. He forgot, sometimes, that occasionally people took him seriously over this sort of thing too. He was out of practice at switching roles. Back when he’d been a Pathfinder nobody had figured he knew anything about cargo manifests. And of course, he’d only been thinking of her as little Marya Fandala, whose company Norasol had enjoyed so much, and not really evaluating her professional skills.

He handed the datapad back to her and patted her shoulder. “I just wanted to make sure they were bringing snacks,” he said. “I haven’t been offworld to shop in a while.”

“There you are,” Finn said, and Kes turned to look at him. He was speaking to Poe, of course. He was walking with Bolt, the Missing boy, and Kes slid a look over to see what Marya’s reaction would be to seeing him. 

She didn’t seem to have a reaction, but she was young, she might not remember much about the Missing. He couldn’t remember if she was from the affected branch of Etto’s family or not. But she noticed Kes’s glance, and took some kind of cue from it, turning her attention to Bolt and Finn. 

Sure enough, it only took her a moment to fix her attention on Bolt. “Ah!” she said, and reached out, gently catching Bolt’s sleeve. “Excuse me! Who are you?”

She spoke in Iberican, and Bolt froze, looking warily from her to Kes. “He doesn’t speak Iberican,” Kes said, in Basic. “Marya, this is Bolt. I think he’s Poe’s cousin. Bolt, this is Marya, who isn’t related to me directly by blood, but might be to you.”

“Really?” Poe asked, paying more attention suddenly. 

“Etto’s uncle Cadi was among the Missing,” Kes said, “and if Marya’s mother was Etto’s cousin Budi or--”

“Vina,” Marya said. “Etto’s cousin Vina, Budi’s sister,  is my mother. Her father was Cadi.”

“Therefore,” Kes said.

“Dizzying,” Finn said, frowning.

“Not if you know everybody,” Kes said.

“I’m sure it was worse before almost everyone died,” Marya said. “Now it’s easier by process of elimination.”

“No,” Kes said wearily, “it’s worse now, because the dead ones all kind of blend together in your head.”

“Also,” Poe put in, “it sucks that everyone’s dead.”

“Thank you, Commander Obvious,” Kes said, sketching him a sarcastic salute. “You know, it’s hard to hear you over that moustache.”

“Wait he’s from the Missing?” Marya demanded, catching up. She still had Bolt’s sleeve; she let her grasp slide to his hand, and held it between both of hers, turning to inspect him. “Where have you been?”

“Uh,” Bolt said. “The. I was-- uh, I was a-- a TIE pilot.”

“What,” Marya said.

“The First Order has them,” Kes said. 

Marya stared at him, then looked back at Bolt, mouth open. She closed her mouth and her gaze snapped back to Kes. “Does Norasol know?”

“I sent her a message,” Kes said. “She does now.” 

“How am I related to her?” Bolt asked, puzzled. “I didn’t follow--”

“I don’t know for sure,” Kes said, “but Norasol probably will.” Poe looked like he was about to say something, so he cut him off pre-emptively. “I already won the bet with her but I tell you what, if that moustache of yours kills her from shock you’ll owe me the bet instead.”

It happened that as Kes finished speaking, he was looking at Rey. She clearly did not know what to make of the conversation, but was cautiously amused. “You’re coming too, yes?” he asked her.

She looked startled to be addressed directly. “Oh,” she said. “Yes, I-- I think so, unless Luke-- I think so.”

“Good,” he said. He looked at Finn. “You as well, yes?”

“Yes,” Finn said, more confidently. He never missed a briefing, that one, and always knew what was going on. Kes was moved by an urge to hug him, but controlled it.

“Good,” he said. He looked at Poe. 

“The moustache is coming,” Poe said.

“Oh,” Kes said, “I don’t want you to shave it off now, Norasol would never believe me that you’d had it in the first place, but it would haunt me. I need to share this pain.” The need to hug someone overwhelmed him, so he went and sat down on the box next to Poe, wrapping his arms around him. Poe laughed and leaned in. “It’s all right, my sweet baby,” Kes said, “I still love you even though you’re ugly now.”

“The sad part is that I think you’re serious,” Poe said. 

“I am,” Kes said. 

 

_______

 

Leia stood in the blown-out window of the former conference room, looking out over the impromptu airfield where ships were shuttling the last of the supplies and personnel to the cruiser headed for Yavin IV. She’d go soon, her luggage had already been loaded, she just wanted a moment to herself. 

She felt Luke’s approach, and made herself visible so he’d find her. She figured he already knew she was there, but it couldn’t hurt to make sure he knew she’d welcome his approach. After a little while, he came in the door. 

“Brr,” he said, “that’s a breeze.”

“It’s refreshing,” she said. The wind was fairly howling through the open window, but there wasn’t any debris in it anymore, so it wasn’t unendurable. She’d have to fix her hair, but that was easily enough done. She turned, at last, to look at her brother. He looked less tired, finally, and more like himself, and as she looked at him, he pulled his eyes back from contemplating middle distance, and managed to give her a small but sincere smile. 

“So,” he said. “Still alive.”

“Still alive,” she said. “Still not any more of a monster than I was.” 

“I couldn’t have stopped him,” Luke said. 

“I could have, and it’s better I didn’t,” she said. “What happens to him isn’t up to me.”

Luke said nothing for a moment, and they stood in breathing quiet together, each thinking, feeling one another’s warmth and presence. She had missed him, for so long. “I wish you were coming to Yavin,” she said, just to say it.

He smiled again, and took her hand. “I do too,” he said. “Maybe I’ll come by, if you stay there long enough.” He was staying behind, here on Util, to help coordinate the defense. He had some other purpose of his own, as well, that Leia hadn’t delved too much into. 

She sighed, and leaned against him. “I’d like to,” she said. “It’s lovely there. Surely something will come up, but I’ll stay there as long as I can.”

“It is lovely there,” Luke agreed. “Say hi to that tree, will you?”

“Oh, yes,” Leia said, “the tree… Shara’s tree.”

“Shara’s tree,” Luke said. “You know, I miss her.”

“Me too,” Leia said. She thought for a moment, then decided if she could talk about it to anyone, it’d be Luke. “Kes was… I think it gave him a lot of peace, but a fair measure of pain too, to see her one last time like that.”

“Mm,” Luke said. “I imagine so.” He leaned away slightly so that he could slide her a sidelong look. “You and Kes have been close.”

“There aren’t many people who remember Alderaan,” she said with some asperity, then relented. “Also I’ve wanted to sleep with him for forty years, at least.”

“Do you think you’ll--” Luke glanced more directly at her. “Or--”

She smirked. “I did,” she said. 

He made a very satisfyingly exaggerated astonished face. “Leia!” he said. “Really.”

“Who knew,” she said. “As a seduction technique, failing to fall to the Dark Side is up there.”

“I can’t think who else it’s ever worked for,” Luke said, leaning back against her shoulder. He paused to lightly punch her arm, though. “You sly old dog, you.”

“I might be a terrifying old woman,” Leia said, “but I’ve clearly still got it.”

“Mm,” Luke said, “Dameron’s aged well. A lot better than I have, anyway.”

“He sure has,” Leia said. 

“Well,” Luke said, “I hope you have fun.”

“That’s not why I’m going,” she said.

“Of course not,” he said, “but if for once in your damn life--”

“I’ve had a long life,” she said. “It wouldn’t be the first time I ever enjoyed myself.” 

“Well,” Luke said. “I’ll try to visit.”

She wrapped her free hand around his arm. “As long as you don’t disappear again.”

“I’ll try not to,” he said. 

“Who knows how this will all work out,” she said. “But at least there’s hope, now. Maybe we can do this crazy thing.”

“Maybe we can,” Luke said, and they stood together looking out over the commotion until it was time for Leia to go fix her hair and get herself on the last shuttle out.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHAT A LONG STRANGE TRIP IT'S BEEN!!!  
> This series isn't totally done, I have more bits to write-- I have several thousand words of Yavin IV scenes, at least, and maybe some sections with Jess Pava and so on, and Norasol, and there's the entire matter of what underlay the misunderstanding between Kes and Poe (which ties in the [backstory with Kes's father that's in Lost Kings](http://archiveofourown.org/works/10153283), I am really way too deep into this)-- but that's it for Big Plot Stuff. I'm not going to go any farther with the Huge Underlying Big Plot Stuff because there'll be new canon in a matter of months and I'd rather avoid committing huge swathes of my soul any further in that direction for now.  
> So, stay subscribed to the series if you want to see Norasol meet Bolt, for example, and see how Rey likes a jungle planet with rainbow sunrises, and so on.  
> But this COMPLETES the major part of the series. Thank you times one hundred thousand to everyone who helped along the way, and everyone who read it, and everyone in general, I love you all. Keep in touch. Hit me up on [Tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/bomberqueen17) or even [Twitter](https://twitter.com/dragonladyB17) (which is more tirefire politics than fandom but I'm on it, at least). Please talk to me, really.  
> But overall, THANK YOU. <3

**Author's Note:**

> I know, I know, I have a constant little mental process that's banging pots and pans together shrieking "THREESOME THREESOME THREESOME" so I'm on the same page, here, I just-- I had to do right by the plot. It takes a while to wind down from this degree of over-plottedness, you know? I _promise_ I'll get there!


End file.
